Remote Desktop Session Shadowing lets an administrator view or take control of another user’s active RDP session without interrupting it. On Windows Server it is both a support tool and an audit control: with session recording and the right event logging, you get a defensible record of who accessed which session and when. This article … Read more
Compression is one of the cheapest performance wins on an IIS-hosted site, and it is also one of the most commonly left on the default. Windows Server ships IIS with static and dynamic compression modules that support gzip out of the box, while Brotli only arrives through cross-platform .NET hosting or third-party modules. Choosing between … Read more
DNS is the most hit service on any internal Windows network and the easiest to leave at defaults. A resolver answering in 40 ms instead of 4 ms multiplies across every login, every API call that resolves a hostname, and every site-to-site lookup. On a single Windows VPS the DNS Server role is often installed … Read more
Two built-in Windows features restrict what software may run: AppLocker and Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC, formerly Device Guard Code Integrity). They overlap enough that teams pick the wrong one and then fight it. AppLocker is policy-through-Group-Policy and readable by anyone who understands file paths and publishers. WDAC is kernel-enforced code integrity with a signed … Read more
Remote Desktop Protocol has two transport options: the classic TCP connection on port 3389, and a UDP side-channel added in Windows Server 2016 and later. Most administrators never think about which one is active, yet the choice directly affects typing latency, video smoothness, and how a session behaves on a lossy link. This guide explains … Read more
Real-time features — chat, dashboards, notifications, live collaboration — all need a persistent connection, and on Windows Server that means WebSockets. Once you move past a demo, the questions change: how many concurrent sockets can IIS hold, what does SignalR change, and where does the ceiling actually sit? This article covers the architecture, the tuning … Read more
A single IIS server eventually hits a ceiling. The two ways past it are scale up (a larger VPS) or scale out (several nodes behind a load balancer). On Windows Server the native scale-out answer is an IIS Web Farm fronted by Application Request Routing (ARR) with URL Rewrite. This walkthrough stands up a two-node … Read more
“HTTP Error 500.30 – ANCM In-Process Start Failure.” “HTTP Error 502.5 – Process Failure.” If you host .NET or ASP.NET Core apps on IIS, you have seen one of these and spent an hour guessing. The good news: IIS has a built-in diagnostic that tells you exactly what happened during startup — Failed Request Tracing … Read more
By the time a request reaches an ASP.NET worker process it has already consumed threads, memory, and possibly a database connection. IIS Request Filtering runs earlier in the pipeline and rejects malformed or hostile requests before the application pays for them. It is not a replacement for a WAF, but it removes an entire class … Read more
RDP has a long-standing security problem: when an administrator logs into a remote server using standard RDP, their cleartext-derived credentials are exposed in the remote session’s memory. Malware on a compromised server can harvest those credentials and pivot to every other machine that admin touches. Two Windows features were built specifically to close this gap … Read more