Connection Pooling for Commerce Server 2007 and 2009

With as little as a couple hundred unique visitors on a website, we were seeing close to 300 SQL logons per second coming from Commerce Server. Every hit to SQL was creating a new connection. Luckily, this is a quick and easy fix to get Commerce Server to start reusing open connections to SQL by using connection pooling.

Take into account though, if you are using impersonation on your Commerce Server website then this is a security risk. If a one user reuses the SQL connection of a different user, they can assume the security rights of that previous user.

IIS Log Management Script in Powershell

IIS logs on a busy webserver can use up a lot of disk space. I wrote this little powershell script that I schedule to run on all of my web servers. It goes in and deletes out any IIS logs older than 1 year. Then it compresses any IIS logs that are left which are older than 1 day and are not already compressed. You can change the length of time for these to suit your needs by changeing the numbers in the "AddDays(-123)" parts of the script. Just make sure it's a negative number, or else you won't have any logs left.

MSCRMEmail: Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved

Below is an error that can appear when you are running the CRM email router on the same server as your CRM web services. I experienced it after adding a second web site on the CRM server to run a portal that is back-ended by CRM. The error was also accompanied by high CPU and memory usage as well.

Disable Weak SSL Ciphers and Protocols in Windows, IIS, ISA, TMG & UAG

You should disable the weak SSL ciphers and protocols that are riddled with vulnerabilities and security flaws on any Microsoft Windows server running IIS, ISA, TMG and UAG.

The resolution for this weakness is rather simple. Merge the data below into your registry and reboot. That's it.

The easiest way to do that is to copy the text from the white box below, past it into notepad and save the file with a ".reg" extension (make sure to change the "Save as type" to "All Files". Backup your registry, then right-click the file and select "merge". Click "Yes" and you are done. If you are running UAC, you need to click "yes" twice.