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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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Create and apply a self-signed certificate – Windows 7/IIS7

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

Creating a self-signed certificate on Windows 7/IIS7 was quite a different experience and it took me more time to set it up and work correctly (in retrospect, it should have been easier as most of things can be configured with GUI tool). Anyway, I don’t want to repeat the pain and relearn how this is done, let me summarize the steps here to share with others and to help me find it easier in a rainy day:

  1. Open IIS7 (If IIS7 is not available from Administrative tools, go to Control Panel – > Programs – > Turn Windows Features On or Off.
  2. Click on machine node then double click on “Server Certificates” on the IIS pane
  3. Select “Create self-signed certificate” from the “Action” pane and give a friendly name such as “WcfSecure” in this case.
  4. Once the server certificate is created, view the certificate detail and write down the Thumbprint, something like ae 8f b2 b4 b0 b6 07 16 8e 73 51 35 38 cd 6b bb 7e 1f 12 d5, and remove the spaces to become ae8fb2b4b0b607168e73513538cd6bbb7e1f12d5, copy it to notepad for later use.
  5. Next, configured the Certificate to port, using VS2010 Guid tool to generate a GUID and run VS2010 Command prompt (must run as admin):netsh http add sslcert ipport=0.0.0.0:8080 certhash=ae8fb2b4b0b607168e73513538cd6bbb7e1f12d5 appid={0270078A-39C3-47E8-845C-07D904672C71}
  6. Created a website to use the certificate so that WCF Service can be hosted in https mode; to do that click on Sites node and right click ->Add Web Site ->Named it “WcfDemo” and assign to Port 444 (443 and 442 have already been taken)
  7. Assign the certificate to the new website by choosing Binding type “https”, and pick the certificate from the Certificate drop down; certificate is on machine or server level, so there could be multiple certificates and multiple site can use same certificate.
  8. Refer to MSDN article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff406125.aspx for more in-depth detail.

It is important to note, that In IIS7, whenever a new website is created, it automatically creates a new application pool named the same as website, in this case, WcfDemo is the new app pool. And it automatically defaulted to use .Net Framework version 2.0, so be careful to manaully change it to the version that your Wcf app is using, in my case, changed to .net 4.0. Pay attention to Identity; by default, the Identity uses ApplicationPoolIdentity, other options are LocalService, LocalSystem, NetworkService, these are under Built-in account dropdown; you can also use Custom account and use the Windows user account for the application pool identity. If sqlexpress database is used for storing Membership users and if the security mode is set to use Integrated Security=true, then the
Application pool identity must use Localsystem or an “An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault was received from the other party. See the inner FaultException for the fault code and detail.” error will throw when WCF client calls the Wcf Service from this website.

If, however, the sql database uses “SQL Server Authentication” mode and passes in a predefined username and password in the sql connection string, then you can leave the default ApplicationPoolIdentity alone.

Posted in .Net Framework, ASP.Net, C#, WCF, Web Services | 2 Responses »
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