Commerce Server

Windows: Disabling Data Execution Prevention

Stephen Horsfield — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:10:56 GMT

Overview

Sometimes, old code doesn't seem to work with the new Data Execution Prevention feature in Microsoft Windows. It's easy to turn it off for non-system applications and services, but how do you do it for system components, and why would you?

Warning: Data Execution Prevention is a security feature. Disabling DEP reduces the security of your system.

Context

On our Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 system, running on Windows Server 2003, we were getting "COM Surrogate" errors, which relate to DEP errors with the dllhost.exe system program. Adding it to the exception list didn't solve our problem.

Solution

Thankfully, Microsoft has written an article on how to turn off DEP for an entire server. For this case, you need to add the following option:

/noexecute=AlwaysOff

to your boot.ini file.

See A detailed description of the Data Execution Prevention (DEP) feature in Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, and Windows Server 2003 (Microsoft Support) for further information.

Versions

Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Commerce Server 2002
Also applicable to Microsoft Windows XP

Metadata

Categories: IT Management, Security, Windows Server, Commerce Server
Additional keywords: how to turn off DEP, disable DEP
Technorati Tags: IT Management, Windows, Windows 2003, problem, DEP, Data Execution Prevention, Commerce Server

Commerce Server 2002: BizDesk Campaign Manager Fails with "Call to Server.CreateObject Failed While Checking Permissions" Error Message

Stephen Horsfield — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:44:33 GMT

Read the article...

Excerpt

The above error was occurring on both staging and live environments for a Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 system. It took us a while to track down the cause, but eventually I fixed it.

References

Microsoft KB Article 811306

Versions

Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Commerce Server 2002

Metadata

Technorati Tags: IT Management, Windows, Windows 2003, problem, Commerce Server

Commerce Server 2002: Reporting — Query Best Practice

Stephen Horsfield — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:41:55 GMT

Overview

How can you make your Commerce Server reports easy to maintain, and how can you make it work with long SQL queries? Did you even know that long SQL queries won't always work?!

The problem

The query is stored in the Report table in SQL Server as an nvarchar(2000) field. This means you've only got 2000 characters to work with. In fact, the limit is smaller than this because of processing that Commerce Server is doing itself. I noticed problems around 900 characters, which seems a bit small!

The solution

The best solution I found was to reference a SQL view that was created for the purpose. Using this, the SQL query just needed to select the particular fields, apply particular filters (such as date filtering) and sorting. This meant that changes to the underlying report execution could be managed by adjusting the view rather than the SQL in the Report table. The view can also be used by many similar reports, which in our case was for about 10 regional sites.

One main caveat was the use of Commerce Server date report parameters. The filtering on this only worked when it was in the Report Query field directly.

Versions

Microsoft Commerce Server 2002
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Metadata

Technorati Tags: software development, Windows, Windows 2003, Commerce Server SQL, SQL Server, reporting