Sumrak's questions

We have IIS servers in Azure behind load balancer. Load balancer has unconfigurable timeout of 4 minutes after which inactive connection is killed.

We're trying to setup nginx as a reverse proxy to the IIS cluster described above. Everything works fine except nginx doesn't send keep alive messages to the server it opened connection to. So, if server takes more than 4 minutes to reply the connection is killed by the load balancer.

If a client (browser) connects to the load balancer directly, it sends TCP keep alive messages and all is good. If client connects to nginx, it sends keep alive to nginx and all is good with connection to nginx. But no keep alive messages between nginx and load balancer, so eventually connection dies.

so_keepalive option seems to be related to the TCP keep alive for connections opened to nginx from client (browser).

We tried other reverse proxies (IIS ARR proxy, haproxy) and always ran into the same issue.

We can't configure load balancer (outside of our control). How could we configure either linux with nginx, nginx, or IIS behind load balancer (to which nginx connects) to get them to send keep alive messages to keep connection open?

in Windows 2008, how can I set up perfmon alerts to execute some scheduled task or batch file? I found examples for Windows 2003, but not 2008.

for example, I want to execute a task if free space on C drive goes below 10%. how would I do that?

I need to set up on my server automated daily SQL db backups (sql express, so no maintenance plans).

To keep things simple I'm gonna use a backup solution (JungleDisk) that uses VSS to back up the DB file. SQL fully supports VSS and on requests freezes DB I/O, so I understand I'm taking snapshots.

JungleDisk supports doing differential back up and compression, so it simplifies things and keeps the cost/bandwidth down.

Is it enough to just backup up db file (mdf). Do I need to back up transaction log (ldf) file as well? I'm ok with losing a day's worth of work (since the last backup).

if I go this route, what's the best way to restore the database?

are there any issues with this approach I'm not aware of?

I'm getting the following error with iis 7 for any page that takes more than 7-10 minutes to complete :

A worker process 'xxxx' serving application pool 'xxxxxx' failed to stop a listener channel for protocol 'http' in the allotted time.

why iis stopping a listener channel? it how can I increase this allotted time? should I? or is this an indication of another issue?

is there a way to limit long-running processes in iis 7? for example, if I have ASP.NET application and it takes longer than 10 minutes to generate response, I want it recycled.

how can I configure this?