IIS Aid Articles: All

Getting stats from hMailServer Greylisting

Dominic Ryan — Thu, 17 May 2012 04:00:58 -0400

Greylisting is one of the many powerful spam blocking tools at your disposal and is built right into hMailServer. Although hMailServer does have a logging option which the popular AWStats application can read, neither this or any of the other standard logging options in hMailServer give you any real insite into just how effective Greylisting is. Fortunately though all this information is stored in the hMailServer database in the greylisting triplets table, and in this article we'll be looking at how to use a few SQL queries in phpMyAdmin to extract some useful data from this.

PHP 5.4 Released

Dominic Ryan — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:19:05 -0400

The PHP dev team have recently released version 5.4.0 which is a pretty major milestone. Just browsing through some of the most notable improvements which include some new language syntax, support for multibyte languages at the flick of a (runtime) switch and the addition of a built in CLI based webserver which should create some lively "it's not the server it's your code" style debates between Server Administrators and Developers.

Stand against SOPA

Dominic Ryan — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:51:41 -0500

It has been quite a while since I've posted anything, so it is perhaps a little disappointing that I write now not to help users of this site but rather ask them for their help. Currently there is a bill before the US Senate that if passed will not only censor the Internet for US citizens, but has the potential to censor it for us all. Who is behind it? The Entertainment Industry, who else. For the 100,000 plus users from the US who used my site last year, I encourage you to read on to see what you can do to help stand against this potentially devastating attempt at controlling the Internet.

Looking back on PHP on IIS

Dominic Ryan — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 08:01:08 -0400

Just finished reading over an interesting blog post by Brian Swan about reflecting on PHP-Microsoft Interoperability on IIS. It is a good read and a quite an accomplishment to see how PHP has matured as a platform on IIS. Certainly the release of the FastCGI and WinCache modules stand out to me as really pivotal milestones to date.

Internet Explorer 9 beta released

Dominic Ryan — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:56:56 -0400

With so many quality browsers to choose from these days, Microsoft certainly have changed their tune towards their offering over the last few years. After having only IE6 from 2001 to 2006, today we have now seen the release of the IE9 beta. Plenty of great work being done under the bonnet here too, even just from the IE8 release. New to Internet Explorer 9 include an new user interface, pinned sites, improved performance and wider support for the new breed of web standards.

Back on track

Dominic Ryan — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 08:14:48 -0400

It's been fairly quite around here of late for which I apologise. Have had a lot on my plate which unfortunately has resulted in me not having a great deal of time for creating new content for the site. I'll be looking to rectify that over the coming weeks and have a series of articles planned on topics from spam prevention throught to performance testing and scalability. If there are topics related to any sort of Internet facing technologies you wish to see covered, feel free to add a comment below with the details.

6th Microsoft IIS MVP Award Received

Dominic Ryan — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:09:22 -0500

I received an email over the weekend informing me that I have been awarded an IIS MVP from Microsoft for 2010, making it the 6th such award in as many years. Hard to believe it has been that long already since I was awarded with my first IIS MVP. Thanks to Microsoft for the award, and for their MVP program!

Wincache RTW Released

Dominic Ryan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:34:45 -0500

Some very exciting news from the IIS.net site this morning with the production release of the much anticipated WinCache PHP extension for IIS. If you aren't yet aware, the WinCache extension for IIS is an opcode and file cache utility for PHP, which will give PHP performance on IIS a massive shot in the arm. This is demonstarted in the testing I did last month of WinCache performance on a live site where I saw a massive 250% performance increase simply by enabling this extension.

Wincache performance on a live site

Dominic Ryan — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:54:09 -0400

Earlier this month the IIS team released the first release candidate of their exciting new Wincache caching extension for PHP. In my view this new extension is the most significant work the IIS Team have done for hosting PHP applications on IIS since the they released the FastCGI handler for IIS back in 2006.

WinCache Opcode Cache for IIS

Dominic Ryan — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:04:26 -0400

I've been doing some testing with Microsoft over the last month or two which I've simply been itching to talk about, but haven't been able to until now due to NDA. At the start of September the IIS team released a new PHP extension called WinCache for use with PHP/FastCGI on IIS which fills that large whole in PHP performance on IIS where an opcode cache should be. I've done some testing on my beta site, and the results have been very encouraging.

Write for IIS Aid

Dominic Ryan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:09:22 -0400

Firstly, I'd like to apologise for the lack of new content on the site over the past few months. I've recently started a new job and have been finding myself quite mentally exhausted by the time I get home, and in anything but the mood I need to be in to start to look at creating new content. Until I settle in fully I can't see that changing, and with this in mind I'd like to extend an invitation for any IIS related guides readers might have that they might like published.

PHP 5.3.0 Released

Dominic Ryan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:31:26 -0400

The PHP group has just announced the release of PHP 5.3.0. PHP has had some pretty major wwork done for this release, so make sure you read up on what has changed before you consider upgrading.

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS with IIS 7

Dominic Ryan — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 10:50:16 -0400

Getting onto two years ago now I wrote an article that has become quite popular that detailed three methods to redirect HTTP to HTTPS. At that time there wasn't a lot in the way of options for URL manipulation on IIS, and Helicon's ISAPI Rewrite 2 was the de facto standard. Now there are several options for rewriting URL's on IIS, and users of IIS 7 are able to take advantage of Microsoft's own URL Rewrite module. In this guide we'll look at how you can use Microsoft's URL rewrite module to transparently redirect HTTP to HTTPS.

Working with PDO extensions on IIS

Dominic Ryan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:51:43 -0400

Have you ever tried enabling the php_pdo_mysql.dll extension or similar only to find that PHP reports that it is unable to load it or even have PHP crash? This is probably because you followed the normal process for enabling PHP extensions for Windows. If you did this with your PDO extensions however, you'd be wrong.

IIS teams contributions to the PHP engine

Dominic Ryan — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:06:31 -0400

Just read over a nice blog post by Mai-lan (Product Unit Manager for IIS) which summarised the contributions the IIS team have made to the PHP engine and community over the last couple of years. Having used PHP on IIS myself for coming around to 8 years now I can say there has been a tremendous acceleration in the uptake and interest in PHP on IIS.