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Setting Request Limit on IIS7

We had a client trying to upload a 44mb file, and it was failing.  The ColdFusion page that that did the upload had a very high timeout setting, so I didn't think that timeout was the issue.  The ColdFusion administrator had a request limit set of 100MB (which I believe is the default).  What was up? 

It took a bit of googling to realize that IIS7 (the webserver on our Windows 2008 Server), had a default request limit of 30MB.  The solution is rather simple.  With IIS7, a web.config file can be used to set a variety of webserver settings, so I added one to the site that was having the problem.  Here are the contents of the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <security>
            <requestFiltering>
                <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="1024000000"/>
            </requestFiltering>
        </security>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

This sets the request size limit to 100MB, to bring it in line with ColdFusion.  This isn't the only thing that can be controlled with web.config.  For some information on how to tighten security on a site using web.config see this page: http://www.petefreitag.com/item/741.cfm

Comments (1)   Posted on May 3, 2010 1:44:47 PM EDT by David Hammond

Disabling Script Execution in a Directory in IIS7

Last night I was trying to disable script execution in the uploads folder of a site running in IIS (Windows 2008).  It is also running ColdFusion, which turned out to be important.  I ran into a couple problems.

The first was that I had no idea how to do that in IIS7.  I knew how to do it in IIS6, but everything is different in IIS7.  I thought I would be able to just find it, but after poking around for a while, I gave up and ran to Google.  Turns out the new location to set this is in Handler Mappings.  If you go to the Handler Mappings feature for a directory and click on "Edit Feature Permissions...", you can uncheck the "Script" permission.

So I did that, and I thought I was done, but then I noticed that not only could I not run scripts from the directory, but trying to access a static file, such as a gif, also gave me a "403 Access Denied" message.  Strange.

It turns out that ColdFusion installs a wildcard script map, which means that it is set up to handle all files, even static ones.  I don't know what the reason for this is (and I would love to find out if anybody knows), but it was getting in the way of the default static file handler.  I had to remove that handler for the directory in order for the static files to be served properly.

Comments (5)   Posted on July 28, 2009 11:14:36 AM EDT by David Hammond

Setting Up GZip Compression in IIS

It's good to compress all of your static web files for your users.  It means faster downloads for your users.  You may be vaguely aware that IIS can gzip your javascript and css files for you, but if you're like me you've been too lazy to figure out how to set it up.  Also, if you're like me, you look at a page like this very helpful article from Microsoft and say, "What, you expect me to read all of this!"

Using HTTP Compression for Faster Downloads (IIS 6.0)

Well, this page is for people like me.  I didn't actually read the whole page, but I did read enough to get the basics and figure out the steps to set up gzip compression, and here they are!

1. Enable HTTP Compression
   1. Open IIS Manager
   2. Right-click "Web Site" and select "Services" tab.
   3. Check "Compress Static Files"
   4. Click "Okay"
      
2. Specify that "js" and "css" file should be compressed by changing the metabase.  By default, IIS 6.0 is set up to compress htm, html, and txt files.
   
   1. Open a command prompt
   2. cd to C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts (assuming the default location)
   3. run this command (you can change the list of extensions, but only specify static, compressible files here):
      cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set w3svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcFileExtensions "htm" "html" "txt" "js" "css"
3. Restart the World Wide Web Publishing Service

That's it!  If you want more details information, want to set up different compression for different sites, or want to compress dynamic pages too, you should of course read the above link.

Comments (0)   Posted on January 1, 1970 7:12:06 PM EST by Catherine Field