Jimiz.net – Jim Becher on the web

Today I had the need to go to MSDN and look up some information. I have not directly gone to MSDN for a while. when I opened up the site I got this banner bar across the top

It offered me the advise that I should use IE8 instead of my current browser (Firefox). The reason is that IE is Faster, Safer, and easier. I was amazed, I did not know IE8 was safer.

Then when I went to the root of MSDN I got this advertisement (POP over)

I find it hard to believe that IE is better than firefox, but I guess Microsoft thinks so.

— Update —
I just got another site with a different advertisement for ie8. This time I was using chrome.

I have been a little behind on my releases of iisreporter. I had a commander edition ready to go before some technical issues and source control issues slowed it down.
Currently a alpha build is in works for a IIS7 version of iisreporter. I want to roll in the commander features into this release.

What will those features be.
1. Multiple server monitoring (non free version)
2. Remote server monitoring (non free version)
3. IIS 7 and II6 support (free)
4. Widget / Sidbar integration (from a client)
5. Web based version.

Please email and watch here for more information

Well I have many ideas on how to update and modify the IIS reporter application I have written. I have finally got VS2005 up and running on my machine and will try to migrate IIS reporter over to 2.0.

I have a few releases I need to get up to the source server. I also have a web service version that I need to make public to allow others who are more gifted in programming to take a look and modify. More to come….

There is a fantastic document over at Microsoft about the updated security features of IIS 6.0 vs IIS 5.0. It is a very good read and has some great information. You can find the document here (www.microsoft.com).

I admin many IIS boxes at work and frequent many IIS user lists and sites to add information about security and hardening. This document does not show you how to harden your IIS installation but it does explain the reasons to use the new IIS 6.0 server

I have finally completed the move from gotdotnet.com to sourceforge.net.

You can get to the sourceforge page at this link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iisreporter/
So far I have been really happy with the sourceforge location. I ended up udating my CVS to use sourceforge. I am currently using both SourceSafe and TortoiseCVS.

Just to let you know how much I am enjoying sourceforge. I had an issue with the creation of the folder that contains the source information for the project. I sent a support message at about 1 AM on Saturday morning and the guys at SF (sourceforge) fixed the issue a few hours later.

To date it looks like IIS Reporter has been downloaded 1,903 times (as of today). That is a lot of people for a simple app. Please keep the updates and ideas flowing.

Thank you to everyone for their great ideas and suggestions. I have cleaned up a few memory issues (performance) and also added a few monitoring features.

I added a system tray icon and menu info for real time info
Updated the system uptime clock – it was polling the sum and not the real info.
I also updated the xml write feature, that if it is set to on it will write info on each refresh.

Screen shot

System Tray

As always send me comments, suggestions, and ideas.

Here is a screen shot from v1.6

I have rolled out another update to IIS Reporter. Version 1.6 is now the most current. I have added many features to both enhance the program and also ease the use.

Below is a list of things added and removed, but before I get into the new features let me discuss one major change. I had to drop the (Connection Attempts/Sec) counter. For some reason Visual Studio 2003 is not returning the correct information from the performance counter. I have tried a few different ways of createing the instance of the performance counter, with no luck. It appears to be returning the total connection attempts (Sum of connections) rather than the connections attempts per second. I will keep looking for a solution but till then I have replaced this counter with Maximum Connections. Max connections is the max number of connections for the uptime of the web service.

Here is a list of updates / changes

1. Removed Connection Attempts/ Sec and replaced with Max Connections
2. Added Tool tips for all instances on the forms (this is the nice little info that appears when you hover you mouse over areas of the app.
3. Added definitions to each counter and what is returned. If you click on the name it will tell you the info
4. Added a status bar icon. When minimized the app will run in the status bar on the right.
5. Write to an XML file – I have added a feature to write all this infor for IIS to a XML file. The xml file is in the same directory are the iisreporter.exe file.

Happy Downloading – You can download the new version here

Updated screen shot

I received an email today showing that IIStoolshed.com has just added IIS Reporter as one of their downloadable tools.

That is great news. I often browse and try different applications that are listed on iistoolshed.com. It is a great site and has lots of info for Microsoft’s IIS web server.

Some other useful IIS links are :
www.iisfaq.com
www.iisanswers.com

I made some updates to IIS Reporter today.

1. Removed bug with connections label
2. Took out about author area
3. Removed config files ( I decided that this should be a stand alone .exe file)

I am also making the finishing touches on my IIS Reporter web app and webservice.
The web service can be installed on any IIS server and will return specific info of that server or a remote server.

Link to IIS reporter
http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/iisreport

The other day I was administering some of our web servers at the datacenter. I ran into an issue I had no good way of knowing how many people were on the webserver before issuing an iisreset. The iisreset command restarts the web service and kicks all active users off. Currently on windows you can open the performance monitor and check the number of web service active connections but this is a lengthly process.

So I did some googling for any product or program that would allow me to do this quickly. I found nothing and decided to write one myself. I called it IIS reporter and it does exactly that, it reports on the current status of IIS.

Currently it shows:
Number of active connections
Number of anonymous connections
Free Memory
Pages per second
Users per second

This app is a VB .NET app writen in Visual Studio 2003. I have created a gotdotnet workspace that includes source code.

IIS Reporter Dot Net Workspace – you can join the development team