I have an ASP.NET web site that responds with multiple skins depending on the domain that it is accessed via.
The problem is that authentication and some other features seem to suffer random glitches where the user is sent back to the log in screen, or other session controlled values appear to have been lost - but only when accessed via one of the domains. The other domain does not suffer the same issue.
On our test system, the issues DOES NOT exist when accessing via any domain. On live, the issue will happen at varying times during the session, even with identical steps followed. It is for these reasons that I don't think it is a bug in the application software.
On the live system, where the issue is, two websites are set up in IIS, each with bindings to the required domain. One accesses the site through a virtual directory at http://mysite.com/myvirtualdir, the other accesses the site at the root path at http://myalternatesite.com/. I don't think that the virtual directory is the issue however.
I've now solved my problem, though still not sure what the exact cause was.
I opened up website properties for the two websites in IIS, the one that worked and the one that didn't and compared properties.
For anyone else trouble shooting this issue, these are the steps that I took, in order of how likely I think they were to be the cause of the issue.
Second website was using Default app pool. There is nothing particular about the Default app pool settings on this server that would cause session to be lost from what I can see, but I have now changed to use the same app pool as the site that was working all along.
Disabled windows authentication to match the working website.
Changed default documents so that only the required document was listed.
Limited connections to 500 to match the working website.
Hope this is of use to somebody else.
Related
I've got a situation that I'm a little confused by as I cannot replicate it on any of my other environments.
The site is still in development and therefore has practically no traffic other than the two of us working on it. So if the site is in a dormant state (all IIS instances closed etc) when I first log in the IPrinciple doesn't get set correctly (in time?) and so subsequent security checks obviously fail. I can then immediately go back to the login page, perform an identical log in and all is fine.
This also occurs irrespective of which user I test with so it's not specific to an account.
I can then log in and log out with any user accounts and this never occurs again. This never occurs in Development on my local machine and I also have an instance of the system in my local IIS instance I use as a faux staging environment. I only ever see this on an idle Production environment.
What can I do to prevent this situation from ever occurring? Is this also suggesting there maybe an issue elsewhere?
After having done a bit of experimentation it turned out that the problem was only manifesting in Google Chrome. All other browsers were performing as expected.
The solution was actually an oversight on my part. It seems Google Chrome has stricter rules around how cookies are dealt with in relation to domains.
Setting the domain attribute on the authentication cookie fixed the issue and now Google Chrome also logs in as expected.
I have a few ASP.NET sites running on one IIS server, of course using different ports. The sites allow for logging in via forms authentication. Session state is stored on a local state server. My problem is that when a user logs into one sites and then navigates to another, they get an exception from the second site and have to close/reopen their web browser to be able to access it. My guess is that the cookie from the first site is making it appear that they're logged in on the second one as well (though I could be completely wrong about this).
I've tried a few things to fix it (which are probably dumb and have nothing to do with the problem, but I'm far from an ASP.NET expert) including:
1) giving the sites different cookie names in Web.config's sessionState tag, and
2) Moving the sites to different app pools, but the problem persists. Any help would be appreciated.
I'd recommend setting up different domains for each site. If this is local, use the host file to route local.site1.com and local.site2.com to the correct place. Obviously you'll have to keep the port. Then you should be setting cookie with a different domain for each site and not causing the confusion.
I'm a beginner in ASP.NET 2.0.Probably this could sound too basic and stupid issue for someone expert in the ASP.NET.But this is giving me sleepless nights.
Basically i have developed a simple multilingual website with a master page and content pages which fills inside the content place holder portions of the master page. The application works great when it is configured to run on the ASP.NET Development Server 2.0. But once i publish it to run on the IIS web server it will no longer function. :( I could see from the trace that none of the session variables i use are stored and redirected to the relevant content pages.
Although the contents are displayed, the session variable values by which i take some decisions on the redirected pages are lost and i run into exceptions.
Please guide me where am i going wrong and exact procedure for Publishing an application.
Ex: my home page has URL which runs something like
http://localhost/Onlineupdate/Home.aspx?vers=1.1&lang=fr-FR
Based on the above URL, i strip and save the vers and the lang variables in a Session variable. However these are lost when hosted on IIS.
There are a dozen or so things that could cause the session data to be lost:
IIS restarting
The app pool restarting
due to a change to the web.config
due to a change to anything in the \bin directory
memory limit reached, or a bug causing the app pool to reset.
several other possible causes
Your host is actually a web farm, and you're using in-process memory, which will cause issues when one server fails over to the other, unless you're using SQL Server session state mode.
Since we don't have enough information to answer exactly what's happening in your specific situation, I'd ask you to start by reading up, starting here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178581.aspx
Edit: I did find this blog article, which may be helpful: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/amenon/archive/2007/08/21/troubleshooting-session-loss.aspx
The following is not necessarily part of the answer, but added to try to be helpful.
If it's feasible, from my own personal experience, we've had success in eliminating our lost session issues by using the SqlServer Session State mode. Since we implemented this, our session issues have all but disappeared.
also i found the main problem that you should initialize session before use
like:
session[“id”]=””;
and after that it well work fine
In order to prevent this to happen first in the web.config set restartOnExternalChanges to false.
Now in web.config changes must be propagated manually(this means that the dev is now responsible to build a mechanism for config change propagation).
Hint: You can use file watcher for this that will listen for the web.config (or any config you use in you web. app) for changes and wrap it as a watchable configuration so you can reload the configs when they are changed.
Hope this helps
I faced the same issue in my ASP.NET MVC website .
and i have resolve it by next steps :
open IIS Manager
go to the application pools
right click on the application pool which related to your website
click on "Advanced Settings"
set "Idle Time-out (minutes)" to be "20"
set "Maximum Worker Processes" to be "1"
Click Ok to close the window
these steps has resolved my issue.
I am trying to get a grasp on how to handle updates to a live, functioning ASP.NET (2.0 or greater) Application while there are users on the site.
For example, suppose SO is an ASP.NET Web Application project. The project code compiles down to the single .DLL in the BIN folder. Now, there are constantly users on SO, so what would happen to users' actions/sessions if you would use the Visual Studio .NET "Publish" feature (or just FTP everything again manually) while they are using the site?
Would creating an ASP.NET Web Site, instead, alleviate any problems that may or may not exist with the scenario above? I am beginning to develop a web site as a user-driven Web Application, and I want to make sure that my inexperience with this would not potentially annoy the [potentially] many users that I [want to] have 24/7.
EDIT: Sorry, I should have put this in a more exact context. Assume that this site is being hosted by a web hosting service with monthly fees. I won't be managing the server itself, just what the web host allows as a user of their services.
I create two Web sites in IIS. One is the production Web site, and the other is a static Web site with an HttpHandler that sends all requests to a single static "We're updating" HTML page served with an HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. Typically the update Web site is turned off. When it's time to update, we stop the production Web site, start the update Web site, and now we can fiddle with the production Web site all we want without worrying about DLLs being locked or worker processes needing to be spun down.
I started doing this because
App_Offline.htm really does not work well in Web Gardens, which we use.
App_Offline.htm serves its page as 404, which is bad if you're down for a meaningful period of time.
We can start the upgraded production Web site with modified settings (only listening on localhost), where we can do a last-minute acceptance/verification that everything is working before we flip the switch, turning off the update Web site and re-enabling the production Web site.
Things this does not solve include
Any maintenance that requires a restart of the server--you still have downtime where no page is served.
Any maintenance that diddles with the .NET runtime, like upgrading to the latest service pack.
Other approaches I've seen include
Having two servers. Send all load balancing requests to one server, upgrade the other one; then rinse and repeat. Most of us don't have this luxury.
Creating multiple bin directories, like bin-1.0.0.0 and bin-1.1.0.0 and telling ASP.NET which bin directory to use in the web.config file. (One advantage of this is that reverting to a previous binary is just editing a config file. A disadvantage is that it's harder to revert resources that don't end up in your binaries, like templates and images and such.) I don't remember how this actually worked--I think the application did some late assembly loading in its Global.asax based on its own web.config section (since you touched the web.config, the app had restarted, so it was okay).
If you find a better way, let me know!
Changing to the asp.net web site model won't have any effect, as the recycle will also happen, some of changes that trigger it for sure: web.config, global.asax, app_code.
After the recycle, user will still be logged in because asp.net will just validate the syntax. That is given you use a fixed machine key, otherwise it will change on each recycle. This is something you want to do anyway as other stuff can break if the key change across requests i.e. viewstate validation, embedded resources (decryption of the url fails).
If you can put the session out of process, like in sql server, you will avoid loosing the session. If you can't, your code will have to consider that. There are plenty of scenarios where you can avoid using session, and others were you can wrap it and re-retrieve the info if the session was cleaned. This should leave you with a handful specific cases that you know can give trouble to the users, so for those you do some of the suggestions others have already made.
One solution could be to deploy your application into a load balanced environment (web farm).
When deploying a new version you would use the load balancer to redirect requests to the server you are not deploying to.
App_offline.htm is great solution for this I think.
in SO we see application currently unavailable page when a deployment begins.
I am not sure how SO handles it.. But we usually put a holding page. So what ever the user has done (adding question or answering questions) does not get updated. As soon as he updates something he will see a holding page asking him to try after sometime.
And if I am the user I usually press the back button to make sure what I entered is saved in the browser history so that I can post later.
Some site use use are in clustered environment so I take one server offline and inform the load balancer that she will not be available and once I make sure that the new version is working fine I make it live.. I do the same thing for the next server.
Do we have any other option?
It is not a technical solution, but set up a scheduled maintenance window. You can annoucement in advance giving your user base fair warning that there is a possiblity that the application will not be available during that time frame.
Following recent hardware problems, I attempted to switch a couple of our websites to use new, individual application pools. A test run on our staging server worked fine, and has had no visible negative consequences.
Unfortunately, trying the same operation on our live machine left one of our key applications struggling - my best guess is with some kind of mismatch in Session state. I could log in fine, but a few clicks later would be presented with a screen that was part login screen, but with all menus visible. This indicates to me that part of the system thinks the session had been lost (redirect to login page), but IIS itself had not lost the session (hence the menus showing on the master page).
I tried recycling all the Application Pools (new and old), and each website using IIS Manager. I also tried a single-space change to the web.config file, and a full release of the dll's. Still, I could intermittently use the system for a few clicks, do some useful stuff, then maybe find myself at a login screen again or similar. We have some logging and on some occasions I could see that the session was being timed-out after a couple of seconds, substantially less than the settings on the App-pool (default 20mins).
As soon as I switched the web site's app-pool back to the default, everything was ok again.
What have I missed? Any suggestions gratefully received!
EDIT:
Just thought... on the staging environment I did name the App-pool differently from the website name (e.g. Xxxx_Dev, Xxx_Test etc) but on live I just called it the same name as the website. Could this cause an issue?
do your various applications all use Forms Authentication? Have you specified unique path attributes in each form tag in the web.config under the Authentication tag?
OK. I think I've found the problem.
I was actually using an Application Pool that had been set up by someone else - of the expected name - but they had set it up with the Properties, Performance tab | Web Garden option to use 4 worker processes. I have now changed that to 1.
As the session state was being stored 'In Process' (the default), each time the connection hit a new thread it also essentially lost any stored session variables, as I now understand things.
Its early days, but a simple switch to the newly altered Application Pool (no restarts or web.config saves necessary thus far) and everything appears to be behaving normally.