Our asp.net app writes errors to a text log file in the web sites root folder. This has lead to all sorts of permission problems, different flavors of IIS and windows allow different things by default.
So what I am wondering is there a location somewhere in Windows where all types of users can write a file without any extra permissions that will also work for all IIS and flavors of windows?
I am thinking of the ApplicationData folder, but did this exist in Server 2003 ?
Thanks,
AJ
The easiest solution would be to use the App_Data subfolder of your web application for this. By default it's not viewable from the web, so Internet clients won't be able to read the logs.
Depending on your deployment method, you might have to change the permission to allow write access to this folder (to the user under which your web application is running).
Alternatively, there is a place where every user can write to: It's that user's temporary folder, which you can access through Path.GetTempPath. This, however, does not sound like a suitable location for log files.
You should always first think about wwwroot folder (%systemdrive%\inetpub\wwwroot) because it has the required permission.
The permission you need is to set a full control for IIS_IUSRS
Edit: you can simply give Everyone Full Control (not recommended at all) but this solves most of ntfs permissions issues with IIS
Related
I am running IIS 7 and ASP.NET 4. It's an online charting application where one folder needs to have read/write access. Users don't upload anything into this folder directly; instead they configure chart settings and then ASP.NET generates the chart on the server and saves it as an image into that read/write folder. Users are redirected to download the image of the chart from that folder.
In order to allow IIS/ASP.NET to save an image into the folder, I give WRITE permission to IIS AppPool/ChartApp account.
But, I am worried to have write access on a folder that's open to HTTP. While there is no direct way to upload a file via my site into that folder, I am concerned that hackers will find a way to upload a script and then execute it. Are these valid concerns? Is there anything else I need to do to secure such a read/write folder?
Thanks.
The configuration is sound and a normal standard setup. As you point out, there is no way to upload a file unless you add one.
If your particularly paranoid about this, you can setup a new user account and use that account as the 'anonymous user' account (which is the credentials used by the common browsing user on your site), and ensure that account doesn't have write acccess while the AppPool account does. The anonymous user uses the AppPool identity by default.
What are all the user accounts for IIS/ASP.NET and how do they differ? has details on each different account type.
What I ended up doing is to use a different account to write the file. The code from this article worked well for impersionation. The account that writes the file has write permissions, and the "main" AppPool account is still read only.
My question is preaty simple. Is there any way to give current user (IIS User, in this case, ASP NET USER) permission to write to a specific folder location (folder inside our web application) using web.config? Because, it's getting boring to ask to the web hoster to gain access to a specific folder each time we want to do a file uploader on a website.
I know it's maybe preaty simple to find an answer using google, but it keeps returning me how to write INTO web.config instead of permission to write into web.config FOR a specific folder. In addition, I'm french so my english is not at the top.
No. If that was possible, you could write an application which, when deployed on a server, would allow you to write to any directory on the disk despite write access being denied by the administrator.
You can easily grant permissions for a local user (e.g. the user that the IIS worker process/app pool is running as) to a folder anywhere on your filesystem actually through rights permissions in Windows itself but this does not allow for doing this through the web.config file itself. Please give us a description of what you're trying to do specifically and there may be a better solution. The solution I mentioned above could be a bit of a security risk but it depends on the needs and situation.
So, from what I understand .NET (and web.config) don't really control write permissions.
You'll need to either expose the folder from a filesystem and/or webserver level to allow people access (though this may be somewhat of a security issue depending on your scenario). Or another possibility would be to create a simple web-page that allows uploading files to the directory.
I recently started an Orchard-CMS website. That's a new CMS which uses ASP.NET MVC 3. http://www.orchardproject.net you can find more info.
It has to be really easy to install a theme. But everytime i try that, i get the error that the dependencies.xml file is not accessable. (Orchard needs the dependencies.xml file, to write the links to new theme's and modules)
My site is running on an IIS7 local machine and i granted all permissions to the ASP.NET user and the NETWORK USER. But i still have permission-problems, any ideas?
By default the IIS 7 application pools run under IUSR account, so you should grant this user the appropriate permissions. From security perspective it's good to create a new, separate account for each application pool and I'd advise you to do so. It'll also give you more fine-grained control.
Also, check whether the permission changes were correctly propagated to App_Data and App_Data/Dependencies folder and their content. If not, change permissions for Dependencies folder explicitly. I've noticed that sometimes they don't get propagated correctly if you change permission at the root level.
I've just installed windows server 2008 r2 along with visual studio and dropbox. I'm using it as a VM for development and dropbox helps me keep my files in sync with other machines.
I've got my site set up in IIS but I'm getting an access denied error when trying to view the site. I've had this before and to get around it in the past I've gone through and added the IIS_User account to the list of permissions to read/modify the files. I assume because the file's have been copied down with drop box the files don't have the necessary permissions. Here's the bugger, I can't batch update the files by modifying permissions on a folder, I'm having to do it right to the file level and even worse, one at a time! I can't have this.
I'm relatively new to 2008 r2 and IIS 7 so I have no idea what's happening here. Can someone explain what is going on and if there's an IIS/file permission setting I can update to resolve it at the top level folder?
I've tried adding anonymous permssions on the website in IIS and I've added permissions on the folder for IIS_User (even Everyone). I have an Administrator account and that's already set to allow me to read/write/modify the files.
This is typically the message I'm getting 'An error occurred loading a configuration file: Access to the path X is denied'.
This is happening on ascx & aspx files as well as config files.
Edits:
The site is visible when debugging from Visual Studio.
The site is operating in Full Trust (internal)
Please help, this is stopping me from working and driving me insane!
By default in IIS 7, websites run as the local system's network account (NetworkService), not as IIS_User.
To verify, in IIS Manager, select the Site in question, click Basic Settings... and check the Application Pool it is assigned to. Then go into Application Pools and check the Identity for that Application Pool. Make sure that user listed is in the ACL.
Adding Everyone to the ACL should work instead, but just in case I would suggest you check the above. Also of course make sure when you set the ACL to check the box for resetting inheritance on all subfolders, if that is appropriate for your application.
You could also try setting the identity of the application pool to a local (or domain) user you have created which has access to your application directory.
Hope that helps.
Regarding whether other identities would work for your app pool, that depends entirely on whether those identities have permissions to all the files and/or databases and other resources you application needs to access. Right now you have the application running under your user account, which is generally not recommended. IIS has your password cached, and if you change it, your application will stop working until you update the application pool configuration.
As far as setting NTFS permissions, it can get tricky. Once you have disabled permissions inheritance, that file or folder will need to be updated individually every time you need a permission change. The flip side of this is that you cannot remove inherited entries on an ACL, you can only add to them. However you can design a strategy that offers a baseline level of permission at the root of a file structure, and then add permissions to subfolders/files.
In order to check & reset inheritance on a folder, go into its properties, security tab, click advanced, then click Edit. You can see whether this folder inherits permissions from its parent, and optionally wipe out all subfolder/file permissions and enable inheritance on all child folders & files.
Hope this helps.
No matter what I do such as give Network Service and the ASP.NET account full rights to the folder that contains the image, I am still getting this error for a System.IO.File.Move. Anyone know what other accounts I may be missing here? Network Service is the account running the app pool under which this site runs on and I gave Network Service full rights to the entire folder.
I've tried everything. I gave Network Service and the machinename\aspnet full permissions to the folder that contains this .jpg. I'm testing this code and this move on localhost...my developer machine.
Have you tried using SysInternals FileMon now part of Process Monitor. You can use it to watch for the file access events or the access denied event.
It might be because you write into some other folder that is not under the ASP.NET application (eg %TEMP% folder or something). In this case the account used is IUSR_MACHINENAME which represents anonymous user.
You either need to impersonate, use another folder or give write privileges to IUSR_XXX (which I don't think is a good idea) to deal with that.
On the machine hosting the shared drive, make sure to set things up under both these tabs:
Sharing -> Permissions
Security
Most of us deal with the Security tab for getting IIS stuff working, but it was the former that was giving me the same issue with the .MoveTo() method. (It could read, just not move).
To further complicate matters, I also had the directory shared as multiple names - make sure to check the permissions for each shared name.