IIS7 Crash Cookies Reading Pool

Question

This is one of the serious problems: I installed IIS7.5 on my computer and started developing the website. Every night I maintain it on my web server, winning 2008r2 sp1 (all updates). It works flawlessly.

However, I ran into a huge problem while sharing cookies in application pools. www.example.com was set to 127.0.0.1 so that I can check the site locally. It created cookies, but when I deleted the HOSTS record (to point to the web server), the application pool on the web server crashed. This happens every time, and you may have to do something with the cookie sessionID, since without cookies this DOESNT fails!

log file:

Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 7.5.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7afa2 Faulting module name: nlssorting.dll, version: 4.0.30319.239, time stamp: 0x4e182039 Exception code: 0xc00000fd Fault offset: 0x0000000000001d7d Faulting process id: 0x9f8 Faulting application start time: 0x01ccbbd76b7a443c Faulting application path: c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\w3wp.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\nlssorting.dll Report Id: a9cfd0cf-27ca-11e1-bced-00215e5304da 

What's happening?

Answer 1

ASP.NET auth cookie is encrypted and decrypted using the machineKey parameter in web.config. If you do not have it, it is automatically generated each time the application starts. It is recommended that you set a fixed value to avoid invalidating cookies between application reloads.

I cannot be sure, but it may be that the asp.net session session cookie also depends on this encryption key. I am sure that the viewstate uses it as well (this would be the reason that you see errors with an invalid view in the view when you initiate a postback after the application is closed due to inactivity).

So, try installing the machine key and see that this is still happening. You can use IIS to create it, and it inserts it in the right place in the web.config file.