Securing mojoPortal with a Custom Machine Key

Last Updated on Sunday, 13 November 2011 11:03 Written by Rick Hubka Monday, 6 December 2010 01:51

September 17, 2010 Microsoft issued a Security Advisory
Vulnerability in ASP.NET

This not the first time, nor will it be the last time.
Who is responsible for the security of your Web Site?
You are!

MojoPortal has a lot of documentation on Securing MojoPortal.  They also have documentation on How and Why You Should Generate a Custom Machine Key.

However, in this blog post I am going to walk you through making a Custom machine key in crystal clear detail with all the pictures included.

First make sure you are logged in as administrator and go to the Administration Menu.  If your screen looks like this and Security Advisor says “Needs Attention!” click Learn More.  If it does not, stop reading for now and you are done.

Web Deploy – Common Errors

Last Updated on Saturday, 9 October 2010 11:21 Written by Ronald Craft Saturday, 9 October 2010 11:15

Due to the complicated nature and the overall lack of documentation on web deploy and some issues with it this blog post is being written to help you understand some of the common errors and what they mean.

“Error: An unsupported response was received. The response header ‘MSDeploy.Response’ was ” but ‘v1′ was expected.
Error: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.”
This means that you do not have access. On our newer servers web deploy is enabled from the Management tab in your website. Older servers require web deploy to be enabled for each account, so please submit a support ticket if you need it enabled. In order to verify whether you have it enabled already, open your control panel and navigate to Websites > Click the name of your website (domain.com for example) > Click the Management tab (if it’s there). There you will set a username and password for your both your web deploy and remote IIS user.

Error: The remote server returned an error: (503) Server Unavailable.

Web Deploy may not be setup or running on that server. Please contact us in order to resolve the issue.

An error occurred when the request was processed on the remote computer.
The server experienced an issue processing the request. Contact the server administrator for more information.

This is the most common error we see and, unfortunately, it does not tell you much. What this means is that, usually, you have successfully connected to the server, however for some reason your deployment failed. Usually, this means that you are attempting to do something that you do not have access to do (such as deploying to the root directory – which you need full control permissions in order to do and this must be granted by us). Please check your settings and ensure that everything is correct. Also, if you do contact us, providing a screenshot of your deployment settings (Service URL, Site/Application and Username/Password) will assist us in troubleshooting your issue.

Lastly, I want to talk about the SetAcl deployment handler. Once you decide to publish to your root directory you can do some damage by removing the permissions from your files/folders if you aren’t careful. In order to fix this each file/folder must be reclaimed and the permissions reset, which is quite a bit of work and very time consuming for us.

SetAcl can be found in your WAP project file.

What is SetAcl? It’s a provider that lets you set permissions on file system objects. Typically, this involves setting permissions on a sub-folder of your application, such as App_Data.

How to Use Web Deploy to deploy your website

Last Updated on Sunday, 13 March 2011 10:39 Written by Ronald Craft Saturday, 7 August 2010 03:56

This blog post will detail how to use Visual Studio 2010 to deploy your website or ASP.NET application to your Arvixe hosted site. Web Deploy allows you to publish your site quickly and easily without having to login to the control panel or FTP. For those not familiar with Web Deploy you can read more about it here:  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/426/overview-of-web-deploy/

Arvixe offers Web Deploy service with all ASP/ASP.NET hosting packages.

Requirements:

i) You need to have Remote IIS Management enabled. You can enable it from the “Management” tab in your website properties in your Arvixe control panel. Inquire our staff if you run into any problems. The username and password you choose in that tab will be the username and password you use for Web Deploy.

ii)You need to have Visual Studio 2010 and the web deploy plugin ( x86 version – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109365 x64 version – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109366 )

If you are a new customer: Web Deploy is automatically setup for you along with Remote IIS when your account is created. To enable it login to your control panel and go to Websites > Click on your website > Click on the Management tab > Enter a username and password > Click Enable. From that point you can follow this blog tutorial on how to use web deploy.

If you are an existing customer: Web Deploy is setup on a per user/site request. Please submit a ticket to have Web Deploy enabled for your account. If you require it on more then one website, please list them in the ticket.