IIS client certificate authentication — mutual TLS, or mTLS — lets you authenticate users and services with certificates instead of, or in front of, Windows credentials. It is the strongest access control IIS offers without a VPN, and it fails in three confusing ways: 403.16 when the server rejects the client certificate chain, 403.7 when … Read more
HTTP/2 is enabled by default on Windows Server 2016 and later, but HTTP/3 is not, and both need specific registry keys to behave correctly behind a proxy or load balancer. This guide covers enabling HTTP/3 over QUIC on IIS, verifying HTTP/2 is actually negotiating, and the TLS cipher suites that must be present for either … Read more
The first request to an ASP.NET application after an IIS restart is always the slowest. Application pool recycling, a server reboot, or a config change forces the worker process to recompile assemblies and warm caches, and that first user pays the entire cost — often five to thirty seconds of spinner. Application Initialization, built into … Read more
PowerShell transcription and Script Block Logging are the two audit controls that most Windows Server incidents are eventually reconstructed from. They do different jobs: transcript files record what appeared on the console and in the pipeline for a whole session, while event 4104 records the parsed script block itself, which is what you need when … Read more
Choosing the install option for Windows Server is one of the few decisions on a VPS that is expensive to reverse. The two options ship the same kernel, the same drivers, and the same servicing stack, but they present a very different footprint to the network and to whoever administers them. The trade-off is not … Read more
Printing from a Remote Desktop session on a Windows Server VPS is one of the most common support tickets in RDP environments — sessions show no printers, users see a generic “Microsoft Print to PDF” only, or the Redirection feature appears greyed out entirely. This guide explains how RDP printer redirection actually works (it does … Read more
An ASP.NET application that allocates steadily until it is recycled on a schedule is not leaking by accident — it is usually hitting a limit that nobody tuned. IIS ships with private and virtual memory limits set to zero, meaning no limit at all, yet recycled pools and out-of-memory kills turn up in production because … Read more
A remote desktop session that drops after a fixed interval of inactivity is almost never a network fault. It is a policy — either a Group Policy timeout on the server, a session limit on a Remote Desktop Session Host, or a stateful firewall that forgets an idle TCP flow. Each cause leaves a different … Read more
Measured throughput, startup, and memory numbers for .NET 10, .NET 8, and .NET Framework 4.8.1 on IIS 10 under Windows Server 2025, with sizing guidance for hosted Windows instances.
A triage playbook for RDP failures: map the on-screen error to the exact event ID, then fix CredSSP encryption oracle, NLA mismatch, and expired self-signed certificate problems.