I want to plan a schedule maintenance down time on one of my production asp.net website hosted on IIS windows server 2003.
I think this is the preferred behavior:
All request to http://www.x.com including www.x.com/asb/asd/ will be redirected to a notification page (site is currently down. come back later)
The maintenance will take around an hour. how do I ensure for having this redirection to maintenance page to have the least impact to SEO/google ranking
Preferrably I want to be able to quietly test the production site before it goes back 'live'
Preferrably I dont want to rely on pointing DNS elsewhere.
To make it simple please pretend that I don't have any other hardware in front of the web servers (i.e load balancer, firewall etc)
An idea would be:
to create another app on the same web server
create httpmodule or httphandler to handle any url request and 302 redirect them to the maintenance page
Thanks
Try putting App_Offline.htm to the root directory.
copy an app_offline.htm file to the webroot
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/10/06/426755.aspx
Related
I have a website which is used by a number of users, when we tried to update some new changes it always has some downtime. Now i want to display a page which is hosted on some other server or domain using IIS settings, is it possible. I know i can do it by using app_offline.htm page, but i don't want to use the manual process. is there any setting on iis by using which i can redirect website to that page when website is suffering for downtime.
A possible solution is to have an extra IIS site configured on the same server, bound to the same domain and port. That extra site is normally stopped. When you want to do maintenance you can stop your main site and start that extra site instead.
But that is mostly just an awkward workaround for functionality that is already available in using app_offline.htm.
Hi pardon my ignorance i'm coming from an apache background.
On IIS/ASP.NET (.NET 4.0) is it possible to redirect all incoming requests to a page for for maintenance and such. I tried just using a 404 redirect but it doesn't seem to cut it.
Thanks in advance
You may use an App_Offline.html file when you want to bring an ASP.NET site into maintenance mode:
The way app_offline.htm works is that you place this file in the root
of the application. When ASP.NET sees it, it will shut-down the
app-domain for the application (and not restart it for requests) and
instead send back the contents of the app_offline.htm file in response
to all new dynamic requests for the application. When you are done
updating the site, just delete the file and it will come back online.
I have a CMS application that manages multiple websites, today whenever i change the codebehind of one of these websites - i have to rebuild the dll for all websites, deploy it - this disconnects all current sessions and is really bad.
The iis is configured to listen to all domain requests, if the request is to one of the websites' domain , the application rewrites it, or example, if someone requests for http://www.example.com, and example.com is configured in the application to be website 12, it is rewritten to http://www.example.com/websites/12/default.aspx.
This is done for all websites.
We want to seperate the dlls of the websites from each other, and from the main CMS, we have a virtual directory to each websites, but when trying to rewrite to it, we discover that IIS support this (we get an "Could not load type '_12._Default'". error).
How can we perform this rewrite so it does rewrite to virtual directories, or if anyone has any other solution for the initial dll seperation problem.
Thanks in advance
You can easly do it with iis7
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/
You could use a utility like http://iirf.codeplex.com to achieve this. It's easy to install, improved over past versions, and the owner of the project does respond pretty quickly to questions. Best of all, it's free, and supports global/virtual directory rewriting.
HTH.
I've developed my first web application which, surprisingly, is getting very popular.
Because the website is now live, I have a hard time doing some changes, in fear some people are still logged in and are using the application.
I wish to avoid having a duplicated instance of the web application for testing.
Is there any way to put the website in 'maintenance mode' with only me having access to it? Like redirecting to a page with some info, telling its in maintenance mode.
I wish to avoid having a duplicated
instance of the web application for
testing.
That's your problem right there. For anything but the most trivial sites, you should have a staging or development instance. You should be using source control and have a script to update the main instance.
You can simply drop a file called app_offline.htm in the root of your website and ASP.NET will automatically route all traffic to this page. This file can contain any HTML you wish indicating that your site is down for a short period due to maintenance.
For more information please read App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature:
The way app_offline.htm works is that
you place this file in the root of the
application. When ASP.NET sees it, it
will shut-down the app-domain for the
application (and not restart it for
requests) and instead send back the
contents of the app_offline.htm file
in response to all new dynamic
requests for the application. When
you are done updating the site, just
delete the file and it will come back
online.
This is the answer to your question:
http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/219637/Put-the-website-in-Maintanance-Mode-Under-Construc
There's no such built-in functionality in ASP.NET except app_offline.htm which doesn't quite fit your needs because even you will be denied access to the site. You have to build it on your own but this is best done on the routers and load balancers level than at the application level. Of course this will depend on your network architecture.
Besides building a dev replica of your website to build patches and fixes on, couldn't you just announce a site closing for maintenance several days in advance? I'm not a web programmer, but you might want look into what Hattrick, a popular online soccer management, does for maintaining their site. They use a notification system on the homepage, after users sign-in, that announces when maintenance will be taking place (usually late at night in Europe where a large portion of the players and all the devs are located) and they close down the website for a couple of hours. When they take the site down they post a page, using the same style as the rest of the site, and provide an estimate of when it will be up and running again. Simple, elegant, and when coupled with the long forewarning it seems to do a good job placating the user base.
Give users a long heads up that planned maintenance is scheduled to take place and give them some idea what it is for and most people will be able to accommodate the down time. Nothing is more frustrating than purposefully going to a web app that was up and running 10-20 minutes ago to find it suddenly unavailable and down for maintenance.
Try app_offline.htm ??
What version of ASP.NET? I'm sure there are a million more elegant ways of doing this, but you can change the Default Document in IIS to redirect to Maint.html (or similar).
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.