IIS Application Pool with "Load User Profile"

[visualsi]

For our application to run properly, we need to create Application Pools with “Load User Profile” set to True (which is the default for our systems). No matter how we set up our Application Pools (it seems), they get created with the non-default value of “False” which causes our application to fail miserably. Is there a way to have the installer leave this at the system’s default value?

[Daniel]

Hello,

We've tested the scenario, but we cannot reproduce the behavior. Can you please tell us what is your target machine Windows version? Also, can you please proceed like this:
- install your installation package which manifests this behavior on a target machine having Advanced Installer application installed
- after the installation is done, open Advanced Installer, go to "IIS" page and using the [Wizard] toolbar button choose "Import Web Application" option
- use the "IIS Inspector Wizard" to create a new IIS server scan and save the results in an output XML file (e.g. IIS Scan Data.xml)

and, then send us the generated "IIS Scan Data.xml" file so we can investigate it (please mention the name of Application Pools which manifest this behavior)?

Also, please tell us what version of Advanced Installer you are using.

All the best,
Daniel

[visualsi]

In this instance, we were installing it on Windows 2008R2. It looks like if the user has IIS6 Compatibility installed on the machine along with IIS7, you will see this behavior.

The only way to to handle this reliably is to create an installer that will work correctly in all environments because we will never know exactly what features the user has or why the user might need them. We can ask them to turn on roles or features but cannot ask them to turn off any.

This requires an ability to control this application pool property through the installer.

We would rather not have a list of "post application installer installation instructions" because users will often not bother to do them and instead, these issues will turn into support incidents for us.


We used 10.2 (Enterprise) version of AI.

Thanks,
Rob

[Daniel]

Hello Rob,

I've talked with our development team and we have added this improvement (to set the related property within Advanced Installer UI) on our TODO list. Thank you for your suggestion. Until this improvement will be available in a future version of Advanced Installer, as a workaround, you can use a custom action to set this property.

For example, you can go to "Custom Actions" page and add a "Launch file" custom action with sequence, scheduled as deferred with no impersonation before "Install Execution Stage -> Finish Execution -> InstallFinalize" standard action, like this:

• File to Launch: [WindowsFolder]system32\inetsrv\appcmd
  Command Line: set config -section:applicationPools /[\[]name='YourAppName'[\]].processModel.loadUserProfile:true

In order to schedule the above custom action before "InstallFinalize" standard action you should proceed like this:
- select "Finish Execution" action group and from its context menu choose "Show Standard Action -> Finish Execution -> InstallFinalize"
- select your "Launch file" custom action and drag it just before "InstallFinalize" action

Also, I've attached a sample, created with version 10.2 of Advanced Installer, which implements a similar scenario.

sample.zip

(3.34 KiB) Downloaded 1222 times

Let us know if you have any questions.

All the best,
Daniel

[Daniel]

Hello Rob,

The "Support configuration of all IIS advanced properties" feature was included in version 10.6 of Advanced Installer released on September 30, 2013.

All the best,
Daniel

[manuel_armas]

Where exactly can I find this? IIS advanced properties.. It seems some machine defaulting to the load user profile to True and some are False.. I want to set it always to False.

[Daniel]

Hello,

You can set IIS properties from our "Custom Properties" tab. Just go to "IIS" page, select your web site, application pool, web application or virtual directory and in the right pane select "Custom Properties" tab.

If you have any questions let us know.

All the best,
Daniel