I need some assistance with authentication issues for web messaging. Some background: Windows 2003 Server, sP2, newly built, 2 Xeon 3.2 GHz processors, 4Gb Ram, Nothing else running on the system. Imail 2006.2 new install, two domains, about 7000 users. Have both .Net 1.1 and 2.0 installed. Using IMail database for username storage.
I had a few problems with users being timed out too quickly--one to two minutes, users who lose authentication when they open a browser tab to another site and return to the tab with web messaging--only to find that they have to log in again (time 1-20 seconds), users who have two browswers open and when they move focus to the non-web messaging browser and back (1-30 seconds) authentication is lost--have to log back in. So, I decided it was time to try the patch, upgrade, whatever to Imail-2006.21-Preview02. As it installed, had a momentary panic as it announced it was taking the server to Imail Premium server (Only have standard unlimited license), allowed it to proceed anyway (had to try something to get rid of the complaints). Installation finally finished, opened up the IAdmin page, everything looked good, the page indicated I still had Imail standard. Since I am paranoid (as required in this field), I tested the web messaging interface to see if everything was functioning normally--it wasn't. Attempted to log on, iclient started to open, then bam! right back to the log on page. Tried it again, just a flicker of iclient page opening and bam! back to log on page. Hmmm, as panic started to rear its ugly head, I tried to reason what might be happening. IIS service running as normal, nothing in the Imail logs, smtp mail still being received, pop accounts still working. Started digging into the IIS logs, and according to the logs, I was authenticated both times I logged on. Went back to the log on pages, fired it off about 8-9 times, and all of a sudden, iclient was open. Everything looked normal. I (naturally) logged off and tried to log back on, bam! back to the log on page! Checked the IIS log again, and yep it said I had authenticated all those times and the last time I logged on. What was going on? Checked in IIS, found that IClient had been moved from the Default application pool, and was in its own private pool, how nice. Checked the settings in the application pool and found that they were what I had tested on IClient when it was in the default pool, 60 minute recycle, 50,000 request recycle, yada, yada, until I looked at the web garden and it indicated that there were 8 fine processes ready to fulfil my every request. Yep, you guessed it. When I attempted to log on, the process I was working with accepted my authentication, then the next process popped up, was handed the work to open the IClient and checked to see if I was authenticated and said wait a minute! I don't know who you are, back to the log on page. This was repeated until I kept a process through the opening of the IClient page. Kind of like a server with Alzheimers, makes a lot of new friend every day. I put the number of processes down to 1, set the timer up to 240, the requests up to 100,000 and log on is proceeding normally now. In ASP.Net, the authentication method before the upgrade was set to forms with cookies, now it is set to windows. My question is this, why are the processes not sharing the authentication? What do I need to do to make the processes share authentication so that I can use the resources that are available on this server? Steve Jelinek To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
