• If the Process Operator writes something about w3wp.exe process to log files (CPU usage, priority etc.), it also writes the name of IIS Application Pool running in that process. It allows to see what pool caused high CPU usage.
• There are 2 types of log files now:
  1. Files named “date_here”.log (e.g. 11.07.2010.log): Process Operator writes some of its actions (most important ones) and error messages (if any) to these log files.
  2. Files named “date_here”-CPU-usage.log (e.g. 11.07.2010-CPU-usage.log): These logs contain information about total CPU usage and a list of 3 processes causing the CPU load. Process Operator writes CPU usage data once a minute. So you can see the full history of CPU usage and “heavy” processes. The log format allows importing it to MS Excel, sorting and building graphs.

The main purpose of Process Operator (Server Edition) is to enhance the responsiveness of Windows servers during periods of high CPU loads. You will also notice increased agility and stability of the server.

Process Operator is a Windows service. It adjusts priorities at which applications get CPU times. As a result the server becomes much more responsive. The priority adjustment process is fully automated, but server administrators can make appropriate settings to fine-tune the Process Operator for their specific needs.

The Server Edition of Process Operator is made specially for Windows servers, not for home PC’s. It is designed for Windows 2008 (x86, x64) and Windows 2003 servers and was tested on multiple web servers, mail and DNS servers, and SQL ones.

If some server process (application or service) “eats” too much CPU, the Process Operator sets a lower priority to that process. The process won’t be allowed to use 100% of CPU and other applications will be running fine. The server does not stall. All processes get their CPU time slices. The server becomes more stable and agile. If the punished process uses less CPU for certain time, Process Operator restores its priority back to its original level.

Often when a server has about 100% CPU load it becomes unresponsive and even does not allow the use of Terminal Services, you cannot log in remotely to fix the issues. The Process Operator prevents such cases too.

Just give it a try and you’ll like it!

For more information, please read the Process Operator guide.

SQL Bandwidth Meter 1.0.2 (for MS SQL 2005/2008) released!

SQL Bandwidth Meter is a unique tool for SQL Server 2008 (and 2005) bandwidth usage monitoring, counting and reporting.

What makes it unique? It provides a bandwidth control on per user basis. With this tool you can see the amount of data used (downloaded and uploaded) by each SQL Server user. Thus you can bill your customers for the SQL bandwidth usage or just find out which customers use your SQL server intensively.

Installation is straightforward and only takes a minute by entering IP address of your SQL server and clicking several buttons.

For more information, please read this document.

Bandwidth Meter for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is a unique tool for MS Virtual Server 2005 bandwidth usage monitoring, counting and reporting.

What makes it unique? It provides a bandwidth control on per virtual server basis for different protocols (ARP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP). With this tool you can see the amount of data used (downloaded and uploaded) by each virtual server. Thus you can bill your customers for the bandwidth usage or just find out which servers cause a high network load.

Installation is straightforward and only takes a minute by entering IP address of your server and clicking several buttons.

For more information, please read this document.

SQL Bandwidth Meter is a unique tool for SQL Server 2000 bandwidth usage monitoring, counting and reporting.

What makes it unique? It provides a bandwidth control on per user basis. With this tool you can see the amount of data used (downloaded and uploaded) by each SQL Server user. Thus you can bill your customers for the SQL bandwidth usage or just find out which customers use your SQL server intensively.

Installation is straightforward and only takes a minute by entering IP address and port of your SQL server and clicking several buttons.

For more information, please read this document.

At DotNetPark we offer shared hosting and virtual dedicated servers. And most of our virtual servers are powered by Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. Yes, we know, Hyper-V is here and we do use it. But MS Virtual Server 2005 is still actual and lots of companies use it.

If you provide VDS (VPS) hosting based on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 you know that it does not have a built-in bandwidth usage meter. You need to bill your customers monthly for bandwidth usage (or over usage), but MS Virtual Server 2005 does not make such a report.

Moreover, if you make your own piece of software and try to use MS Virtual Server API you realize fast that there is a bug in MS Virtual Server built-in bandwidth meter function making it just useless.

Fortunately, our programmers found a way to monitor and meter virtual server traffic usage and made an application for it. We use this program in our web hosting business and recently decided to make it a commercial product.

As you know, it is quite easy to make a program for yourself, but it takes a lot of time to make the same piece of software good enough (nice, documented, configurable) for public needs. Anyway, we polish the tool now and are going to show it to you soon!

DNS Inspector is a tool to check DNS health of your (and, of course, your clients’) domain names. It allows to check MX, SOA, NS, reverse DNS (PTR) and other records, compare results of primary and secondary DNS servers and much more. It can inspect multiple domain names at a time and gives you a detailed and easy to read DNS reports.

No installation required! No configuration required.
Just run it and enjoy.

1. Enter a domain name or several domains in “Domains:” field. One domain name per line.
2. Click “Test DNS” button.
3. Wait a little, the program will check DNS health of the domains and create appropriate reports.
4. When the test finished, click report names in “Reports:” list and view them.

New features:

- added: Processing and creation of ‘IIsWebFile’ object
- added: Processing of ‘Custom’ tag of all elements of the IIS metabase

New features:

- added: Multiple IIS FTP sites processing
- improved: IIS metabase parsing speed

(You can see more in history.txt file distributed with the program.)

It is FREE!

How to install the Micro SQL Admin:

1. Install SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.

2. Place index.php to any folder of your website. Be sure there are correct permissions to run PHP. You can rename index.php if you wish.

SimpleDNS Client is a program that can remotely administer Simple DNS Plus servers. It is a Windows GUI application and its interface is similar to Simple DNS server. It allows to create, modify, delete DNS zones etc.

Current version 1.0.6 allows to work with primary DNS zones only. Secondary DNS zones support is coming soon.

This program is especially useful when you use GPRS to manage your Simple DNS server. It works 23 to 51 times faster than Remote Desktop!

No installation required! Just run it and enjoy.

Note: To use Simple DNS Client you have to enable HTTP API on your Simple DNS server. It is simple, please look at the screenshot (click to enlarge):

Simple DNS HTTP API

We need your feedback. Thank you in advance!

New features:

v.2.0.1

- added: Multithreaded processing

v.2.0

- added: Transfer of AccessRead|AccessWrite properties of FTP accounts
- added: Transfer of 29 new IIS website parameters (see the manual for more info)
- added: Transfer of all website directories (virtual and web)
- added: It is possible to change web site home directory
- added: Detailed transfer log
(You can see more in history.txt file distributed with the program.)

The IIS Sites Transfer program is designed to transfer web sites from Microsoft Internet Information Server version 6 (IIS 6) to another IIS 6 server. The program also allows to transfer Windows 2003 users from one server to another and copy FTP logins, virtual directories, application pools, Web/FTP folders structure and assign NTFS folders permissions.

It is a unique tool. There are no such tools as this one, which allows easy transfer lots of web sites at a time, including all usernames, permissions, pools and so on.

IIS Sites Transfer utility does not require a clean installation of Internet Information Services! Moreover, the tool can even help you to transfer any selected group of websites, so you can distribute your websites easily to adjust the servers load.

The most outstanding feature of this tool is that it is able to transfer websites even if the IISAdmin service is not running on the source server! You even do not need the source server to be up and running, you just need to have the metabase.xml file from the server. This makes the IIS Sites Transfer program not only a migration and balancing utility, it is also a disaster recovery tool.

Please take a look at IIS Sites Transfer Quick Start Guide to see how easy it is to migrate websites with this program.

No installation required! No configuration required.
Just run it and enjoy.

Note:

• You need to have metabase.xml file from the source server to accomplish the sites transfer.
  MetaBase.xml is an XML file containing IIS configuration settings. Its default location is
  C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\
• The tool does not help to copy files between servers. But there are a lot of tools and different methods to do so. For example, you can zip (using WinZIP or WinRAR) the files and FTP the archive.
• The IIS Sites Transfer tool does not help to export/import SSL certificates. Please read this article if you need to transfer SSL certificates.
• The tool is not able to copy Administrators user group between servers.

• This program allows monitoring of IIS 6 application pools.
• All the monitoring data is stored in log files.
• It is possible to analyze a pool to find a website (or a virtual application) using too much resources.

Note: Current version of the program allows monitoring and logging of both CPU and RAM usage. But there is an auto-analysis of CPU usage only.

For more information, please read this document.

No installation required! Just run it and enjoy.

IIS 6.0 web sites run under anonymous user accounts. It is IUSR_<machine name> (by default) or other user accounts created by your web hosting control panel. The users’ passwords are set automatically and are never known. However, sometimes for some reason the passwords get out of sync or corrupted and need to be reset. The easiest way to reset these passwords is to use IIS Passwords Sync program. It extracts the passwords that Microsoft IIS 6.0 has in its metabase and updates the accounts in Local Users and Groups to use that passwords.

Run synciis.exe to see IIS Passwords Sync command line syntax.

Note:

• After the passwords synchronization you have to restart Internet Information Services (IIS 6.0) by using its MMC Manager snap-in or iisreset.exe program.
• If there are 2 or more websites running under the same user account the password will be taken from one of them only, even if they have different passwords.

No installation required! No configuration required.
Just run it and enjoy.

The IIS SMTP Monitor program (Windows service) is a tool for IIS 7 (and IIS 6) Pickup folder monitoring. The tool saves the following information in its log file: File Name, File Owner (Windows Account Name), First N bytes of the file (e-mail message). Believe it or not, it is free!

Windows web hosting providers do need this tool to stop outgoing SPAM. If you allow to send mail with ASP or PHP scripts with CDONTS or CDOSYS, your web hosting clients are able to send SPAM from your servers anonymously. And then it gets very difficult to track it down and stop SPAM. As a result, your server is blacklisted and all your customers have problems now. To avoid this you should install IIS SMTP Monitor.

You should also use unique Windows User Names for your IIS websites. Do not use IUSR_computername for all websites. Instead create and assign a new account for each site. E.g. IUSR_SiteNameHere. Actually all decent web hosting control panels do this automatically.

If you have IIS SMTP Monitor installed, you can see the origin (the owner username) of outgoing SPAM messages sent by your customers. And you can find the website by its unique user name and STOP SPAM.

For more information, please read this document.

No installation required! Just run it and enjoy.

No installation required. Just start the program this way:

to get more information and see all the parameters available.

No installation required! No configuration required. Just run it and enjoy.

Share you thoughts and ideas.

What should we improve or add? What do you like or dislike? How did our programs help you?

Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback!