Chrome ASP.NET session vanishes - asp.net

I'm using ASP .NET with VB, no other frameworks or Ajax, only ASP Charts.
web.config:
<sessionState mode="InProc" cookieless="false" timeout="20" cookieName="ASPMPT"/>
Logging in is done via a form and SQL.
The session times out after 10-20 seconds, and I see that Session_End from global.asax is called, then a new session is created. This happens only in Chrome, the other browsers work well.
I also tried using StateServer but no success.
ASP .NET State service is already started.

Set mode="StateServer" in web.config and do the following steps on your server :
Start
Control panel
Administrative tool
Services (you can also run services.msc to get there)
Find ASP.NET State Service
Right-click
Start

Related

ASP.NET ReportViewer error "ASP.NET session has expired or could not be found"

My organization has an ASP.NET application which is a wrapper for our SSRS reports. This app essentially just gives users a series of dropdown menus to navigate to their reports rather than making users navigate to reports via the default SSRS report manager pages.
In this application we have had users experiencing errors, specifically an error: "ASP.NET session has expired or could not be found". This was happening to users after attempting to change a report parameter and re-running the report, after only a few minutes of viewing reports.
I have attempted to use KeepSessionAlive="true"` within my ReportViewer control in combination with extending the Session Timeout value in our web.config. Neither of those things did the trick to resolve this error.
As per the msdn article on Session-State modes available at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.aspx
We ended up switching this from the default InProc mode to StateServer mode and haven't been able to reproduce the error since. Using StateServer mode had an extra hoop to jump through though, in that we had to enable the ASP.NET State Service on our server, set it to Automatic Startup type and then update our web.config sessionState value from:
<sessionState timeout="120"/>
to:
<sessionState mode="StateServer" stateConnectionString="tcpip=localhost:42424" timeout="120"/>

Validation of viewstate MAC failed, but occurs on only 1 out of 2 webfarm servers (machine key is correct)

So I have something weird going on and i can not pin down exactly what is causing it. My asp.net project is live with session state on two production servers that are synced using the following command:
msdeploy -verb:sync -source:webserver,computername=%MACHINE%,username=Administrator,password=%PASSWORD% -dest:webserver 2<&1
The application is an asp.net 4.0 website that is run on two Server 2008 R2 web servers behind a load balanced configuration where the users are set to stick to one server once they connect. We have <MachineKey> set hardcoded with validation and decryption keys in the root site of the application and it is the same between both servers. My application is set up to forward exception events to our email system.
What is happening is that i am receiving the dreaded 'Validation of viewstate MAC failed' from the servers but even though the server load is 50/50 split the errors are coming in on a 99/1 split. So one web server is generating these errors considerably more often than the other one. This is strange considering the servers are synced and all configurations are identical.
I've done extensive searching on this problem and it seems quite difficult to find any solution that doesn't mention or do the following.
<MachineKey> is not identical between servers. (I know for a fact this is not my problem)
Setting enableViewStateMac=false or some other setting that jeopardizes the site security.
Make sure that all action tags on form inputs reference the same page they are placed on
Make sure the instance ID of the servers are the same (they are)
If the user clicks through the page before the entire page (viewstate) has been downloaded (my viewstate is set to render at the top of the page).
Issues with response.redirect and server.transfer
Now i have eliminated all except the last two as possible causes. My application has been running fine for over a year with no issues and right before these errors appeared i enabled SQL session state, migrated the project from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0, and set the set the server mode deployment mode to retail. I have tried recycling the application pools and performing an 'iis reset' to no avail.
Does anyone else have any suggestions as to what i can look at? Bottom line i do NOT want to fix this by opening up security holes in my site.
It appears this is happening to users right after they authenticate using forms authentication the first time they try to log in but i can not confirm this. I also have a theory that this might have to do with caching but i can't be sure on this either.
Here is the juicy bit from my web.config (i have removed some sensitive information)
<system.web>
<httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0"/>
<globalization culture="en-US" uiCulture="en-US" resourceProviderFactoryType="WebResourceFactory"/>
<compilation debug="true" defaultLanguage="c#" explicit="true" strict="true" targetFramework="4.0">
<assemblies>
</assemblies>
</compilation>
<authentication mode="Forms">
<forms name=".ASPXAUTH" loginUrl="Login.aspx" protection="All" slidingExpiration="true"/>
</authentication>
<authorization>
<deny users="?"/>
</authorization>
<sessionState mode="SQLServer" sqlConnectionString="connection" compressionEnabled="true" />
<pages theme="Blue" controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5" clientIDMode="AutoID">
<machineKey validationKey="key" decryptionKey="key" decryption="3DES" validation="SHA1" />
</system.web>
EDIT:Emphasized that i'm using SQL session state with a load balancer set to prefer to route users to the server they started on.
There is an additional possibility that you have not added to your list - ViewStateUserKey.
I have seen issues with applications where the ViewStateUserKey was set to the Session ID on logon and (crucially) before any data is saved to the Session. Since ASP.NET does not persist Session IDs until one or more objects are saved to session this meant that the ID was constantly changing and the Viewstate was failing validation. Even if you have saved something to Session then the Session will be different on each server if you are using the default in-process model and not a state server or SQL session store (as you are doing). Any server specific value or value that is not readily predictable across servers used with ViewStateUserKey will of course also cause this problem.
Otherwise the most common causes of this issue I have seen is where an "Action" attribute is set on a form that is not the URL of the same page as the form (this catches out developers used to PHP or platforms that do not attempt to abstract away from HTTP), or missing Machine Key attributes in the Web.config in multi-server environments (which you seem to have covered).
Ok i appear to have fixed it, though i can not discern what exactly caused it so i will just list all the steps i performed in case someone else has this problem later on.
1 :
Installed these windows updates:
2:
My forms authentication cookie was set to persistent but my session cookie was set to the browser session. I set my forms authentication cookie to be browser session based.
3:
I copied my from the site config to the root of IIS. From all the documentation i could find it should not be necessary for me to do this because IIS should support multiple machine keys for different sites / applications.
4:
Rebooted the server.
That's it! I have not received the errors since then.

cannot use stateserver mode other than inproc

The most irritating problem i've come across. I have an asp.net mvc application with sessionstate mode to stateserver. On my local machine and my old server iis6 it worked but i recently changed to a new server running iis7 and now the line:
<sessionState mode="StateServer" stateConnectionString="tcpip=127.0.0.1:42424" timeout="20" />
doesn't do anything. Even when I set the value in the connectionstring to something that doesn't exist it is ignored and thus it's using inproc only.
All my webapps under iis have the same problem.
I've also tried sqlserver mode with the same result. it just gets ignored.
Why oh why??
There's a place in IIS where you can disable InProcess session state.
These articles should point you in the right direction:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732964%28WS.10%29.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725624%28WS.10%29.aspx

ASP.NET Session Expired error when viewing reports using ReportViewer web control in SSRS 2008

I am getting "ASP.NET Session Expired" error when viewing SQL Server 2008 reports using the Microsoft ReportViewer web control. I found this article http://balanagaraj.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/session-has-expired-in-asp-net/ which suggests to use one worker process in IIS application pool, but that may affect performance, is there any other solution for this? I tried setting "AsyncRendering" to false already and that didn't work.
SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services doesn't use IIS.
I'd assume that you have some sort of ASP.net session that is passing variables to a page that contains the reportViewer control.
This seems like an ASP.net problem not a SSRS problem. Increase the ASP.net session timeout.
You may want to look at you session state.
I had this problem and changes sessionState in system.web to StateServer.
Note that ASP.net state service must be running on the server you are using for the session store.
Plese see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.aspx if interested.
Example:
<sessionState mode="StateServer"
stateConnectionString="tcpip=127.0.0.1:42424"
cookieless="false"
timeout="20"/>

Why does a change of Session State provider lead to an ASPx page yielding garbage?

I have an aspnet webapp which has worked very well up until now.
I was recently asked to explore ways of making it scale better.
I found that seperation of database and Webapp would help.
Further I was told that if I changed my session providing mechanism to SQLServer, I would be able to duplicate the Web Stack to several machines which could each call back to the state server allowing the load to be distirbuted better.
This sounds logical. So I created an ASPState database using ASPNet_RegSQL.exe as detailed in many locations across the web and changed the web.config on my app from:
<sessionState mode="InProc" cookieless="false" timeout="20" />
To:
<sessionState mode="SQLServer"
sqlConnectionString="Server=SomeSQLServer;user=SomeUser;password=SomePassword"
cookieless="false" timeout="20" />
Then I addressed my app, which presented me with its logon screen and I duly logged in.
Once in I was presented, with a page that was not with the page I was expecting.
I can change the sessionstate back and forth. This problem goes away and then comes back based on which set of configuration I use.
Why is this happening?
Nice error Dude :)
Probably a red-herring, but what are you storing in Session state?
When you move from InProc to SQL Server, the stuff you store in SQL must be Serializable (I think)
Use Fiddler to see what's really going on over the wire. To me it looks like your app is sending back an image when the browser is expecting HTML.

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