Question

I’ve been tasked with converting a legacy application to mvc. The app used pgp.exe to pgp sign user input and send it as an email. The application works locally and on a test server but won’t run on a live server. I’ve had to jump though hoops such as running a specified user in the application pool so that we can set the keys in the users profile BUT it worked.

For some reason on the live server which is windows 2003 IIS 6 and identical to the testing server it fails. The problem is pgp.exe just wont seem to sign and create files the message I get from the console out put is. “Signature Error”?? When I put the command into a shell window logged in as the app pool user it runs no problem (after a fight with some permissions) but when running through the mvc application/IIS server it fails. The code used to call the process is below.

        var startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();
        startInfo.FileName = _pgpexeLocation;

        //startInfo.FileName = "pgp.exe";
        startInfo.Arguments = string.Format("-sta \"{0}\" -u keyuser-z keypass +COMPATIBLE +FORCE", _tempFilePath);

        startInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
        startInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
        startInfo.LoadUserProfile = true;

        using (Process exeProcess = Process.Start(startInfo))
        {
            // TODO: set limit to wait for and deal with exit
            exeProcess.WaitForExit();

            //var stringItem = exeProcess.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();
            //Logger.Info(stringItem);
        }

I’m clutching at straws here hoping somebody has done something similar before and can help. I’m guessing it’s key location or file location not being picked up somewhere but not sure what else to try?

Answer 1

Turns out that even though the app pool was using a specific user and I’d set the keys up in that users appdata folder when I checked the underlying process call it was actually trying to pick the keys up from the Default User profile. Not sure if this was an IIS config or something similar but moving the keys and pgp folder to this appdata instead worked?