Operator Error – installing a temporary Web site and forgetting about it

January 19, 2005 @ 2:32 pm

I woke up this morning (ok, so it was closer to noon <g>) to find my Web server down. The West Wind site has been real solid for many months with hardly a blip of any sort so I was a little anxious. Most of the problems I’ve had in recent time have been hardware problems.

Anyway it turns out that nothing serious happened, but <blush> a serious case of operator error. A couple of days ago I updated my SSL certificate on the site. The recommendation for creating a new certificate request is to create a new Web site and issue a new request rather than a renewal from an existing site (not sure if this still holds with IIS 6 btw but…). So I created a new site issued the request and fired off the request to DirectNic who’s my domain and SSL provider. Within an hour I had my updated certificate installed it on the test site, backed up and restored it into my live domain. Works great…

In all of this activity however I forgot to delete the temporary Web site I created. When I created the site it wasn’t running since the default port is already in use by the main site. However, this morning the Web Server cycled and it turns out that the new Web site took priority over the main Web site and started up on Port 80. Aaaaargh!

A quick login with TS and removing the temporary Web site has the site back up and running.

Too many things to remember all the time. The process of installing a cert certainly takes a few steps. I should check and see if creating renewal certs from within the running IIS instance now works reliably – I suspect this bug must have been fixed some time ago. Regardless it seems it’s a bit of work to do all of these things. Backing up certificates especially should be much easier in IIS. Frustratingly, there’s an option on the Server Certificate Wizard page to export a cert to a .pfx file, but it’s not enabled even though there’s a certificate installed. Instead we have to go load the Certificate MMC plug in and then export from there, which is easy once you know to do this, but a major pain if don’t know where to look.

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re: Operator Error – installing a temporary Web site and forgetting about it
by AlexFeldstein January 20, 2005 @ 5:32 am

I renewed a cert from Verisign last week. Worked fine on the same production site.

Just generated the cert file, sent it to them, got the counterpart encrypted file and installed in the IIS wizard. No problems watsoever.

Alex

re: Operator Error – installing a temporary Web site and forgetting about it
by Gabe January 20, 2005 @ 8:42 am

I have always simply done an SSL renewal through the IIS wizard and it has always worked. I've done this in NT4, 2000, and 2003.

re: Operator Error – installing a temporary Web site and forgetting about it
by Rick Strahl January 20, 2005 @ 11:15 pm

I've had problems on several occasions with renewals on Win2k. Ended up with corrupt certs that needed to be renewed again with the provider. I suspect they probably fixed this on W3k though. Next time...