bugfox blog

The latest flap about “net neutrality” started with a test by the Associated Press which found evidence that Comcast is slowing BitTorrent traffic over its network.

If this were really a story about “net neutrality” the report would say that Comcast is identifying BitTorrent packets and transmitting them with lower priority so that they arrive more slowly. But what they actually found is much more disturbing. Comcast actually appears to be generating forged TCP Reset packets from the sender and receiver to trick them into dropping the connection.
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I recently ran into some frustrating problems doing something that ought to be really simple: setting up a directory on IIS so that the files could be downloaded with a HTTP GET. Some files would work fine; others would get a 404 error (NOT FOUND).

Here’s a checklist of possible configuration problems:

• Right-click on the top IIS Manager node, select Properties and press the MIME Types button. Make sure a MIME type is defined for the file extension.
• Click the Web Service Extensions node and make sure there is no web service extension defined for that particular file type. If there is IIS will try to pass the file to it rather than download the file.
• If the file is executable (.dll, .exe, etc.) bring up Properties for the web application, select the Home Directory tab and make sure Execute Permissions is set to “Scripts only”. (NOT to “Scripts and Executables”.)

If you have started developing web services with Windows Communication Framework (WCF) you will no doubt have noticed that it is cleaner and more powerful than the old ASP.NET framework. However there are some hidden pitfalls. In particular WCF is a lot more finicky about how the web server is configured. If you aren’t careful this can cause code

that works in your test environment to mysteriously fail when moved to production. Here are some pointers on how to avoid these problems.
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