Recently, I have been working on an application that provides some web services to a client. The communication between the client and our application runs through HTTPS. Furthermore, the client has to provide a client certificate whenever requesting our web services. The application is built on WCF and runs behind IIS 10 on Windows Server 2016. Everything worked fine until we looked at the response statistics our client had generated, where we could see we weren’t responding 100%. The statistics showed response drop to 90%-95% every other day. Continue Reading…
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Mix of everything
Kerberos and load balancers
Kerberos is a ticket-based authentication protocol, which requires deep understanding to make it work properly. Information about setting it up is somehow scattered over the web, so it took me some time to find relevant reads. In my previous post I wrote about my initial experience with Kerberos and I want to share some more in this one.
Working in a load-balanced environment introduces (administrative) complexity to your system and Kerberos is no exception to this. In this post I will focus on setting your IIS (>= 7.0) correctly up to work with Kerberos in such scenarios. Continue Reading…
The power of feature toggles
Many organizations employ a complex deployment process where every code change has to go through a series of different steps in order to reach the production environment. This is typically due to organizational rules, which require many people to approve the deployment. The result is a big package with many updates to the code that is supposed to be deployed at once. At deployment time the level of stress rises drastically, as there often are unexpected errors – missing configurations, misunderstandings in the team, or special (not well-tested) scenarios. Moreover, if the deployment fails, it needs to be rolled back, which could be a painful process.
taskhostw.exe high CPU usage on Windows 10
I have had my Dell XPS 13 for more than 2 years now and I am still very happy with it. When I bought it initially, it came with Windows 8. Later on I upgraded it to Windows 8.1. And lastly I upgraded it to Windows 10 – the free upgrade offered to many people. Windows 10 suits my computer well as it can be used both as a regular laptop and as a tablet (its screen can be flipped around). Moreover, there are a lot of performance optimizations and configuration improvements in this version of Windows that makes my life better. However, after the upgrade one problem occurred. Continue Reading…
Kerberos tips & tricks
Kerberos is a network authentication protocol based on tickets. It is developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and used across different platforms. I have recently faced the need to use Kerberos on Windows and experienced some frustrations that I want to share in this post. Continue Reading…