Amr Elgarhy's questions

We had a website working with a Godaddy SSL certificate for couple of years, few days ago we decided to use this certificate for another domain and keep the current website work just with HTTP.

We also moved the website to Azure and made sure there are no URL rewrites which redirect HTTP to HTTPs.

But since we did this move, on all browsers the website automatically redirect to HTTPs when the user open it with HTTP like http://www.example.com, it automatically go to https://www.example.com. And for sure this show the annoying message that the website is not secure.

How to stop this behaviour for all users without asking them to change their browsers security settings?

Not sure if these help:

• The website is a very old website written with classic asp
• The SSL Certificate was from Godaddy
• The domain name of this website is on UK2
• The website is now hosted on Azure app services.

I have a VM on Azure, it has many websites and databases with configurations which make it a little tricky to export everything from there.

Now I don't want any of these website to be running and for sure don't want to keep paying for an unused VM on Azure, I stopped the machine, but I am still getting billed because of the storage of the VM disks.

So my question:
How to download the whole VM so that I can back up somewhere else locally and be able to open it on my local machine latter if I needed to copy some files from there?

I have found some articles but because Azure is growing and changing too fast, I found them out dated and couldn't help me what I wanted to achieve.

Any advice or references are much appreciated.

We ran PCI DSS External Vulnerability Scan on our website and the scan failed with many vulnerabilities, all of them are PCI severity: Low except one medium and another one high.

The high one is:

Threat: An SSL Certificate associates an entity (person, organization, host, etc.) with a Public Key. In an SSL connection, the client authenticates the remote server using the server's Certificate and extracts the Public Key in the Certificate to establish the secure connection. The authentication is done by verifying that the public key in the certificate is signed by a trusted third-party Certificate Authority. If a client is unable to verify the certificate, it can abort communication or prompt the user to continue the communication without authentication.

Impact: By exploiting this vulnerability, man-in-the-middle attacks in tandem with DNS cache poisoning can occur. Exception: If the server communicates only with a restricted set of clients who have the server certificate or the trusted CA certificate, then the server or CA certificate may not be available publicly, and the scan will be unable to verify the signature.

Solution: Please install a server certificate signed by a trusted third-party Certificate Authority. Result: Certificate #0 CN=132123-server1 unable to get local issuer certificate

And I have no idea how to solve this issue to pass this point when I rerun the scan. is there any steps I can follow?

Notes:
The server is IIS 8
Website is using SSL wildcard from godaddy.

I have a website in which different suppliers will have their own Mandrill/Mailchimp API to use, and our website will use this API to send emails through their API and using their templates.

While configuring the API mandrill needs to add DKIM and SPF to the domain TXT records.

TXT record for mandrill._domainkey.domainname

So I can't add the same host twice on the domain DNS, how to work around this issue?

I have multiple website on azure, and I wonder if there is any way to limit the bandwidth usage, for example pause the website if the bandwidth exceeds a certain value?

Is that something i can do through azure portal?

I have a pay as you go account.

I have followed many articles to install and config windows azure pack distributed, But every time I finish configuring everything, the azure pack is not working and give me different errors, seams to me there is a network prerequisites I should config first before setting up the servers, for example to keep all server on the same azure network, but I couldn't find anyone mentioning this.

So my question is:
Does just setting up different servers and make them all connect to the same sql server is enough? or there are some network configurations I should do as well?

I installed and configured windows azure pack on 8 virtual machines, 1 component per VM, but after all installed I am trying to run the admin portal or tenant portal and both give me the same error page in IE "this page can't be displayed" when I opened the admin site in firefox from the VM it gave me an error "Unable to connect Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at tnwapserver:30072."

What I feel that there is a missed network configurations I am missing to connect all servers together, but I can't find enough details about this.

So is there any docs describe the network requirements for windows azure pack to make it work? or anyone have experience with configuring azure pack?

I have a website on IIS 7 and I created a subdomain and I want this subdomain to point to a page in this website.

Example:
www.example.com --> this is the main website and its default page is default.aspx
members.example.com --> I want if someone opening this url will forward to this page: www.example.com/members.aspx

How to setup this in my IIS 7?

I have a dedicated server on a webhosting company "not godaddy", and I manage my domains through godaddy.
I want to add a new subdomain and want this domain to point to a certain folder in my website.
I tried to add a new record : mysubdomain -> www.mywebsite.com/subfolder but godaddy appeared a message that this is not a right formate.
How to do this?

I had this question before "Resize image on the fly make the image lose quality online but locally works nice"

And what i got now is that it's not a problem of local or online, i ran this resize on the server itself "dedicated server", and i got the same bad quality image, so the problem is in the IIS configurations.

What in iis can make this bad quality image happen?

I have IIS7 and I am using IIS6 ftp to manage my ftp website.
I have the default website and I created under it some virtual directories.
Now what I want to do is to give ftp users access to just one virtual directory i select, and prevent them from reading or writing to any other folders in the Default ftp site.
I don't want them to navigate through the ftp websites, just want them to access their place.

How i can do that in steps?

I have multiple website on the same shared hosting on godaddy server, its Deluxe Hosting - Windows plan.
I asked before a question about this: How to fix subfolders IIS7 functionality?
But i feel that no one is facing this problem except me, so i want to know what i am doing wrong or if someone had the same problem please tell me.

all my website are in subfolders from the root folder, the problem that all links are showing like this: www.example.com/example/...., www.anotherwebsite.com/anotherwebsite/....
such as this http://amrelgarhy.com/

Means the folder name is showing in the URL, i did all what i can and discussed with godaddy a lot, but they always tell that its a IIS7 problem.

Did you face this problem before or know a solution for?

I have a domain name and website on godaddy, and i used this tool to transfer my mails to gmail https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/google/gmail%5Flogin.asp

After using this, i didn't receive any confirmation mails from google and can't create a google apps account, it says that this domain already registered.

Also when i send them to reset the admin password, they don't send anything.

I just want to know any ideas how to solve this?, or how to contact google regard this issue?

note: i want to use google apps standard.

I have a dedicated windows 2008 server and with Allocated monthly traffic: 1500GB, the hosting company sent me "Please take note that the allocated traffic included with your Budget (calculated by GB of traffic) has been exceeded. You will be billed for the exceeding traffic at the end of the month according to the per GB exceeding traffic fee specified on your contract."

I checked my Google analytics account and didn't find any big different for the websites traffic this month than previous months.

I just want to understand what may cause this sudden increase in traffic this month?

may be ftp access? remoting to webserver too much time? or what may cause this?

Also, is there any tool in the server to know where the traffic went?

In my company we had a bizspark softwares from microsoft, and as we understood that this will help us to lower our webhosting payments, and also some development software costs.

Now my issue that we have already a dedicated server, we pay for it monthly, this server contain windows server 2008 and SQL server 2005, and pay a lot monthly for both of them.

My question is, using softwares and os I got from bizspark can I replace these on the server with bizspark ones? Should I ask the hosting company and they will replace? or should I buy a new empty dedicated web hosting and then give the hosting company my bizspark softwares to install there which will decrease my payments too much?

Please advice I am really confused how to gain the most from this bizspark because it seams that microsoft is trying to help too much but we can't gain.

Also please check this URL, from ScottGu's blog, it may help.

I have a Windows 2008 dedicated server, and I am going to write a service to send newsletters from this server.

Is it possible to send thousands of mails at the same time? What configurations should I check in the server to make sure things will work fine?

Update Send all these mails within 2 days.

I am using godaddy shared windows hosting,

And i am building a new website, and it will have full text search on its SQL Server db.

My Question is, can full text search run on shared hosting? "i am asking because full text search will create files and edit"

I have a problem in my sharing hosting that all websites in subfolders, their URL appear like this: http://amrelgarhy.com/amrelgarhy/

I sent to godaddy, and they sent me that its because of IIS7 and they can't solve, any one can tell me how to fix that?

Here what i sent to godaddy and their reply:

"as i saw before on this page http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp?ci=9009 compare windows plans, "Multiple Web sites: unlimited" so i have the right to run more than one website inside my hosting. But what i am facing now that i can't make more than website as a primary website. I have igurr.com as a primary website, i want to make others as primary because: I am facing a problem that all home pages for the other websites "which physically in sub folders" are like that "http://amrelgarhy.com/amrelgarhy/" the URL + the folder name and that what i don't want."

GODADDY "Thank you for contacting Hosting Support. The behavior you are describing is standard for IIS 7.0 accounts. All alias domains in this environment will append the foldername their located in. I.E. a an alias domain www.coolexample.com pointed to the '/example' directory will display in a browser as "www.coolexample.com/example". This is due to the way IIS 7.0 handles virtual directories. Unfortunately we do not have any direct work around for this. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. "

I have a shared windows hosting account on godaddy, and i setup there 5 different websites on the same hosting space.

I am facing some problems and couldn't solve my self and godaddy can't give me a way to solve.

First these websites are in wordpress, community server, and graffiti CMS.

Problems:

1- all home pages for subdirectory website are like that "http://amrelgarhy.com/amrelgarhy/" so the name of the website exist 2 times in the URL, and this not happening in the root website "igurr.com"

2- Inner websites inheriting properties from the root one, such as the web.config.

3- I really don't know which to make in IIS7 as application root and which not.

4- If the solution is to put the root website in a subfolder like others, how to do this. "seams for me that godaddy not allowing that"

Please check the following screen shots for better understanding and advice me what to do.

http://screencast.com/t/TDUqDLsm

http://screencast.com/t/ZfDfmETQ

http://screencast.com/t/W9LkUmNKhnB

Just bought a new windows 2008 server and i set there some of our websites, the windows firewall is running, should i install an antivirus? and which one you recommend?