November, 2011

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Allow other machine to connect to WCF Service hosted on localhost, Win7/IIS7

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Moving along with my WCF project; today I needed to connect to the WCF services developed and published to my development machine (localhost, let’s mask its name as “dev1″) from another machine, named “user1″,  in the same network domain, and got the “Operation timed out” error 118. My localhost machine is a Windows 7 Enterprise and the WCF services are hosted on IIS7. Obviously, this was a security setting on the firewall on local machine that had blocked remote access.  Below are the steps I went through to get the problem resolved:

  1. First, I checked if I had access to default port, 80 at dev1 from user1 before I did anything; I browsed to http://dev1/Defaultsite/Default.aspx, and fair enough, not a chance – page was not rendering.
  2. On localhost (dev1), I went to Control Panel -> System and Security -> Windows Firewall -> Allowed Programs; highlighted “World Wide Web Services (HTTP) and changed settings -> checked “Domain” and “Home/Work (private)” checkboxes.
  3. Now browsed to http://dev1/Defaultsite/Default.aspx again and it worked!
  4. But when I browsed to a different port at dev1, http://dev1:8088/WcfHost/Service1.svc, I got denied again, error 118, “The operation timed out”, scary..I thought that I might need to turn on Windows Communication Foundation allowed programs inside Windows Firewall; so I did that but then it sill not worked.
  5. Is this WCF issue or port opening issue? To test that, I created a plain website, TestWeb, and hosted at http://dev1:8088/Testweb, and it still cannot be accessed from “user1″ machine. So this must be that port 8088 is not accessible from another machine.
  6. Back to Windows firewall config tool and went to Advanced Security Settings and created a new inbound connection rule, “RemoteAccessToPort8088″ to allow remote connection to port 8088 and 444.
  7. And this did it! Now I was able to access both http://dev1:8088/WcfHost/Service1.svc and https://dev1:444/WcfHost/Service1.svc from “user1″ machine.

Posted in .Net Framework, ASP.Net, C#, IIS7, Security, WCF, Web Development, Web Services | 6 Responses »
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You have been denied access to this machine, IIS6

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

On a Windows 2003 server machine, I had to re-install IIS6; after re-installation, I added a few websites that were created prior to the re-installation back, and suddenly all the websites were automatically flagged as “Stopped”. Tried to start one of them, and got this dreadful error “You have been denied access to this machine.” I Googled this error directly and returned no much useful information except that someone suggested looking into the Windows Event Log; so I did and the underline error was like “Cannot register the URL prefix ‘http://*:80/’ for site..”

Searching the latter error message has yielded a few more useful postings about the issue. I followed the one posted at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890015 and resolved the problem by doing these steps:

  1. Start -> Run -> Regedit
  2. Browsed to Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Http\Parameters\ListenOnlyList
  3. There were three entries under this subkey, 0.0.0.0, 127.0.0.1:80, and 127.0.0.1:8080
  4. Returned to command line and run this command: net stop http
  5. Went back to registry, and removed from the ListenOnlyList all entries except 0.0.0.0
  6. Restarted http services by executing command: net start http
  7. Returned to IIS6 and started the website; this time, the site was started successfully.

Posted in .Net Framework, IIS6 | No Responses »
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Run .Net 1.1 Web Project in Windows 7/IIS7

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

I have to develop and support three versions of .Net projects on one Windows 7 machine running IIS7. After installing VS2003, VS2008 and VS2010 on the machine, it was not without some struggling to get the legacy .Net 1.1 project to run seamlessly in IIS7, so it is worthwhile to write down a few key steps here:

  1. Created a .Net 1.1 website, called Net1_1 in IIS7 and selected Application pool ASP.Net 1.1 from the available Application pool drop-down. The ASP.Net 1.1 application pool was created automatically when Framework 1.1 was installed. If this application pool is not present, that is an indication that .Net 1.1 framework has not been installed or was not installed properly.
  2. Made sure that the ASP.Net 1.1 app pool “Managed Pipeline Mode” is “Classic”, which is default, instead of “Integrated”.
  3. At this point, I tried to browse to the .Net 1.1 app directly from IIS7, I got all sort of errors. They were caused by that ISAPI filter for .Net 1.1 was not  present by default in IIS7. To fix that, I selected the Net1_1 site -> Features View and double-clicked on “ISAPI Filters” icon; clicked on Add, gave it a name “Asp.Net 1.1″ and set “Executable” to be “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_filter.dll”.
  4. Lifted the ISAPI and CGI restriction on the filter by going in to ISAPI and CGI Restrictions pane (accessed from Machine level Feature View) and changed Restriction from “Not Allowed” to “Allowed”.
  5. Almost done; I still got “Access denied” error after all these, why? Googled for “running .net 1.1 on IIS7″ and found a useful post at http://blogs.iis.net/rakkimk/archive/2008/03/20/iis7-running-asp-net-1-1-applications.aspx, which pointed me to download and install .Net framework 1.1 service pack 1. After that, I was able to bring the .Net 1.1 site back to live in IIS7!
  6. Another error, “Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. Access is denied.”, arose when I tried to debug the .Net 1.1 project from VS2003. What’s going on? Well, it’s the notorious Windows 7 “Run as Administrator” thing! I had to run VS 2003 as administrator, open the project from VS2003, and then the error went away. What an inconvenience!

Posted in .Net Framework, ASP.Net, IIS7, Web Development | No Responses »
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