I have a Web application and a WCF service hosted on the same Windows 2003 development server. They each have their own IIS website node responding to drs.displayscreen.web and drs.displayscreen.service host headers respectively. The hosts file contains entries for both headers pointing back to 127.0.0.1. The web site has a service reference to drs.displayscreen.service.
Both applications work perfectly when their application pool uses the ‘Network Service’ account.
I need to perform some COM processing under the hood on the service so I want to run the applications under a customised identity. Both sites run on a new application pool.
When I change the application pool identity to use a new windows account created for the purpose, I get the following (inner) exception: [EndpointNotFoundException: Could not connect to http://drs.displayscreen.service/Handler.svc. TCP error code 10060: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 192.168.98.2:8080. ]
192.168.98.2:8080 is the address of a DNS server that is no longer in use. It is not referenced anywhere in the solution. It is not referenced by ipconfig at all.
I have made sure that the new account is a member of IIS_WPG and I have run aspnet_regiis -ga . I have also given the account explicit permission to read the hosts file.
Why does the application attempt to use the defunct DNS server to resolve the temporary url (drs.displayscreen.service) instead of the hosts file entry? It has to be a permission of some sort because it does not have this problem when running under the network service account. Help!!
Well, it appears that the answer might involve a bug in the .Net framework. I found a blog posting that clued me in to the fact that the MS .Net implementation of SocketCache.GetSocket might cache invalid sockets and another one that suggests a workaround/hack in the form of an explicit don’t-use-proxies configuration setting.
We don’t actually use a proxy server in the environment where this problem cropped up but it appears that SocketCache.GetSocket is overridden or behaves differently when the don’t-use-proxies setting is in place. Strangely, removing the setting causes the problem to come back so obviously the SocketCache is not repaired when a valid ip/hostname is discovered and successfully used. According to the author of the first post mentioned above, the bug does not exist in Mono. 🙂