Larry Brouwer

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How to create a custom self-signed SSL certificate in IIS7

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While installing some demo software today, I had to create a self-signed SSL certificate for IIS7. This is a relatively easy thing to do within the IIS7 Manager. However, the certificate that IIS7 generates is only for the machine that it is running on. I need a certificate that has my custom web site domain name on it. As it turns out, Microsoft has eliminated this capability within IIS7, so the easiest way to accomplish this is to use the selfssl tool from IIS6.

It took me a while to figure out, but after some Googling (with much trial and error), here’s what I came up with.

I found a post, Self-Signed Certificates on IIS7, that I used to create and install the certificate.

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Implementing 301 Redirects from my old blog site

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Ok, so, I have two (2) blogs going right now. My first one is a BlogEngine.Net site which I called my TechNotes. It is located at https://www.larrybrouwer.com:81. My current blog is a WordPress site located at https://www.larrybrouwer.com. This is a problem because the search engines are spidering both, and there are now duplicate entries. Worse yet, the old site is getting priority, so visitors are being directed to my old TechNotes blog instead of my most current one.

What I need to do, is to implement a re-direct solution to retire the old blog gracefully and allow the search engines to be aware of the change.

After some Googling on “301 Redirects IIS7”, and reading a few articles on the subject, I decided to give it a try. I logged into my web server and opened up the IIS Manager Console. I then opened up my web site and first went into HTTP Redirect. This has some promise, but it only allows for wholesale redirects of the entire website to another location. What I need, at least initially, is the ability to redirect individual posts (or pages) of my old blog to my new one.

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IIS7 Extensions Loaded on development web server

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In this post, I just want to keep track of what IIS7 extensions I’ve installed on my development web server, and some brief notes about them. The extensions are located at http://www.iis.net/.

1. Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.

2. Web Platform Installer. This allows for installation of Web Platform Extensions, New Web Applications (i.e. BlogEngine.Net), and Beta Extensions from within the IIS manager. You should really check out the samples. They are also located at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery

3. Advanced logging.

4. Admin Pack 1.0. Originally, I was doing some googling on reporting tools for IIS7 and came across a post for an open source report framework that is an extension to IIS. In the post it said that the reporting tools had been added to the Admin Pack. However, once I installed the Admin Pack, I could not find the reports anywhere. Upon further digging, I found some posts stating that the Reporting extension had been pulled at release, but was still in the Admin Pack RC. I could not find anything to suggest that a report extension is forthcoming.

5. URL Rewrite 2.0 (2010-04-05).

6. Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (2010-04-29)

7. Windows Powershell 2.0 (2010-04-29)

8. Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (2010-04-29)

9. Database Manager 1.0 (2010-04-29)

10. ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010-04-29)

11. Windows Cache Extension for PHP 5.2 (2010-04-29)

12. Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI (KB980363) (2010-04-29)

13. PHP 5.2.13 (2010-04-29)

14. WordPress (2010-04-29)

15. MySQL Connector/Net 5.2 (Dependency) (2010-04-29)

16. MySQL Windows Essential 5.1 (2010-04-29)

17. Hotfix for IIS DB Manager (2010-04-29)

IIS7 Statistics Reporting with Log Parser and AWStats

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Today, I decided that I needed to see a little bit more about the traffic hitting my website. So I set off attempting to find a tool that will help me do just that. After doing some Googling, I ran across a Microsoft utility called Log Parser. So I downloaded and installed it. A great post to read about Log Parser is by Steve Bunting. Another post by Jeff Atwood here. Microsoft Technet has an article about how Log Parser works here. Log Parser is not officially a supported Microsoft tool, the forum site can be found here. Another article from Symantec discusses the fields for parsing and some examples here. I played around with Log Parser some and got some rudimentary results. But since I didn’t want to recreate the wheel, I decided to keep searching.

After Googling on “IIS7 Statistics”, I stumbled upon AWStats. I decided to install it. The documentation for installing on Windows Server 2008 is pretty weak. I found a  great guide to installing AWStats here. The steps can be summarized as follows:

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Adding AWStats to DotNetNuke (DNN)

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I’ve just configured AWStats to work with IIS7 on my web server (see my post, IIS7 Statistics Reporting with Log Parser and AWStats), and now I would like to integrate it into my DotNetNuke (DNN) website.

Here’s an outline of what I would like to do:

  1. Be able to log into my DNN web site as an authenticated user and navigate to a web statistics page. I don’t want anonymous users to view my stats.
  2. Create a script that runs in the background to keep the statistics up to date and have it re-generate the html page for the stats.
  3. See if I can programmatically adjust the LoadPlugin=”timezone –7” for US Central daylight savings or standard time. I really don’t want to have to remember this 2x per year.

So the first thing I did was to open the IIS7 Manager and navigate to my DNN website. I then Right Clicked on it and selected ‘Add Virtual Directory…’. I then choose ‘Statistics’ for my Alias, and navigated to the correct directory path of the AWStats webroot or ‘C:\AWStats\wwwroot’. I then opened up IE and navigated to my web site at https://www.larrybrouwer.com/stats/larrybrouwer_com_stats.html, and it displayed just fine.

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