VMworld is about to Begin.

And we have great seats right down front.

Issue Installing FTP within IIS when you have the Firewall Enabled

So in Windows 2008 R2, there is a bug when installing FTP within IIS when you have the firewall enabled.

After you install the role service, the system automatically sets up the firewall rules needed and enabled them.  One of those inbound rules is “FTP Server (FTP Traffic-In)”.  Though this port should be open you see that if you enable firewall logging its dropping any traffic on this port.   The problem comes from the service “ftpsvc” didn’t get its service SID set correctly.  More on service SIDs can be found at http://sourcedaddy.com/windows-7/understanding-service-sids.html  and http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2008/02/03/ws2008-windows-service-hardening.aspx.

To view the current SID for ftpsvc run the following from a command problem.

sc qsidtype ftpsvc

                (Note: You can’t just use “sc” in PowerShell because “sc” is an alias for Set-Content.)

Which should give the following output.

[SC] QueryServiceConfig2 SUCCESS

SERVICE_NAME: ftpsvc

SERVICE_SID_TYPE:  UNRESTRICTED

This looks correct, but if you run the following command that sets the service sid to what it already is:

sc sidtype ftpsvc unrestricted

               

                Then restart ftpsvc with:

                                net stop ftpsvc

                                net start ftpsvc

The service now works, this has been a problem of over 2 years and a bug report exists at http://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsServerFeedback/feedback/details/524831/default-ftp-firewall-port-21-rule-is-broken-in-windows-2008-r2.  Thank you Transsient77 for the fix.

Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Mvc, Version=1.0.0.0 ...

Today while updating a previously Visual Studio 2010 Website to use Visual Studio 2012 I got an error building the website in VS2012. The website calls some web services and error occurred any way I tried to build the site.

Reference.svcmap: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Mvc, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. App_WebReferences/WebServiceName/

This seemed odd because I hadn't used System.Web.Mvc in that project and it wasn't used as namespace or an added assembly. After looking around I did find several posts talking about similar issues and my best guess is that one of the used DLL's actually require it.

Solution

While I don't know the exact cause the solution was simple enough. Add the following to the web.conf file.

  .....
  
    
      
        
          
          
        
      
    
   
 ........

After which I finally found an answer on stackoverflow with the same solution.

When you add  Service References and  use the advance settings and but chose to not reuse types in referenced assembles. If you already added the Service Reference edit by clicking Configure Service Reference on the svcmap.

Add Service Advance Settings - Do not Reuse Types

I currently don't know why either of these fix it and don't have the time today to dig in and figure out why.

Goodluck.

VMWorld 2012

I'm surprised  and excited to announce that I"ll be attending VMworld 2012 this year and even more surprised to say I'll actually sitting on a panel to talk about “Doing More with Less” by Leveraging Desktop Virtualization to Reduce Costs While Improving Learning. I'll be speaking about how Northern Kentucky University (NKU) is offering more services to our students and faulty. Offering a better experiences, faster delivery of professor needs, using less time of support staff, and doing it all without spending more than we were previously.

I'll be attending VMworld with Paul Ritter, NKU's Server Team Manager,  so expect additional VMworld posts from us in the coming weeks. Also remember that if you attending VMworld to register for our session and if you have questions please leave them in the comments and I'll attempt to get answers ahead of time.


EUC3380 - Live Panel Discussion on How Education Customers Are “Doing More with Less” by Leveraging Desktop Virtualization to Reduce Costs While Improving Learning


I'll also try and take this chance to release some projects I built for NKU but honestly never got around to publishing or polishing enough for general release.

For an example I wrote a website for reporting VMware View Statistics (a feature sorely missing from the VMware product).

Active Connections from the Statistics Site

I modified the powershell scripts in I use for the Thin Client made using Windows 7 to provide a Lab Status Web Page for students that shows in real time which labs have Thin Clients and how many.