The Althoff Chronicles

We recently migrated a production environment for a client to new Servers. I had previously been using MSDeploy to deploy the websites/services to the servers so I figured all I had to do was install MSDeploy, point Update my deploy scripts to point to the new servers, and deploy! I was using MSDeploy 2 on the previous servers so I figured it would work on the new ones. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be that easy. When I ran the updated scripts I got the following error: Fatal: Request to remote agent URL ' http://myserver/MSDEPLOYAGENTSERVICE ' failed. Fatal: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized. Fatal count: 1 I was using an admin account and I could hit that URL above in a browser so I knew it wasn’t an authorization issue. Here are the things I tried that DIDN’T work: Uninstall/Reinstall MSDeploy 2 Install MSDeploy 3 Create the fake user group on the server per these instructions: http://www.iis.net/learn/publish/troubleshooting-web-dep...

  Recently, We had a website that didn’t have frequent visitors, but when the visitors did come, the website would take a long time to load up the first time. This is expected behavior because IIS shuts down its worker threads. 1 approach would be to set the IdleTimeout to 0 which means the threads are never aborted (details here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771956(v=ws.10).aspx ). Instead of that though I decided to try my hand at PowerShell and came up with the following script: 1: # List of URLS to Ping 2: $urls = @( "Http://URL1.com" , "https://URL2.com" ) 3:   4: #Ping all URLs in the list 5: foreach ($objItem in $urls) { 6: $req=[system.Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create($objItem); 7: $res = $req.getresponse(); 8: $stat = $res.statuscode; 9: $res.Close(); 10: 11: #Pump it out to a text file 12: $res | Out-File pingresults.txt -append 13: } After that I set up a simple ...