Jun 18 2009

2008 Server Activation Error – 0×8007232B

If you are getting an activation error on your 2008 server something like:

“Key management services (KMS) host could not be located in domain name system (DNS), please have your system administrator verify that a KMS is published in DNS.”

Don’t stress it is the same problem / error that I blogged about earlier with VISTA activation problems, just using a different error message.

Here is the blog post for the Vista activation fix, it also works for 2008 server.


Jun 9 2009

IIS 7.5 – New Features

IIS.7.5 Internet Information Services (IIS) have some interesting new features in Windows Server 2008 R2, which justifies the new version number, i.e. IIS 7.5. Most noteworthy  is that you can now run ASP.Net applications on Server Core. Of course, it will reduce security if you install .NET on Server Core, but IIS without .NET doesn’t make much sense either. The performance-related improvements are not very exciting in my opinion. However, support for 256 logical processor cores makes Windows an interesting server OS for cloud computing.

IIS-7.5.-Manager

Internet Information Services 7.5 (IIS)
  • PowerShell provider for IIS 7 has more than 50 new cmdlets
  • Administration Pack extensions: Database Manager (SQL Server management within IIS Manager), Configuration Editor (generate scripts with a GUI to automate administrative tasks), IIS Reports, Request Filtering (HTTP filtering, URL rewriting, etc.)
  • One-click publishing in Visual Studio 10
  • Web Deployment Tool (formerly MS Deploy): Deployment, management, and migration of Web applications, sites, and entire servers
  • Configuration Tracing: track configuration changes to IIS and applications
  • New performance counters
  • .NET support for Server Core
  • WebDav integration (was available before as a separate extension)
  • URLScan 3.0 integration: restricts the types of HTTP requests (was available before as a separate extension)
  • FTP server services: integrated in the IIS administration interface; new .NET XML-based *.config format; virtual host names for FTP sites; improved logging
  • Integrated extensions: new kind of extensions that appear to be an integral part of IIS
Scalability
  • Support for up to 256 logical processor cores (Windows Server 2008 supports 64 logical cores)
  • Hyper-V virtual machines support up to 32 logical cores (Hyper-V 1.0 supports 4 processor cores)
  • IP Stickiness: Configure the time period (weeks or months) that a connection state to a specific cluster node persists
Storage
  • Performance: Reduced processor utilization for “wire speed” transmissions; improved input/output process (NTIO); up to 32 paths to a storage device are supported; improved iSCSI client; storage subsystem allows hardware vendors to optimize their storage mini-driver; better Chkdsk performance
  • Availability: Failover to alternative path; configuration snapshots (ability to restore a previous configuration)
  • Manageability: Automated deployment of configuration settings using Unattend.xml; improved monitoring (new performance counters, logging for storage drivers, health-based monitoring)

Above taken from http://4sysops.com/archives/windows-server-2008-r2-new-features-the-complete-list-part-3-iis-75-and-performance/

I highly recommend looking at the requesting filtering this is URLScan 3.0 built in

http://blogs.msdn.com/carlosag/archive/2008/03/24/IISAdminPackRequestFiltering.aspx

Another awesome feature is the Inbuilt IIS reporting and SQL management.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/03/26/new-log-reporting-database-management-and-other-cool-admin-modules-for-iis-7.aspx