Month: December 2016

Downloads and Email Pop Up Windows in myHeritage

myHeritage has been a very helpful tool for us since going live in July of 2016.  That being said, there are always growing pains when moving to an entirely new database system for company management.  myHeritage displays certain content in a separate popup window like downloads and email windows withing the system.  In order to ensure you are able to download files or send email in myHeritage, please add an exception for myHeritage to your browsers list of Pop Up blocker exceptions.

Populi wrote a new article about this topic called Why Won’t the Email Windows Open When I Try to Email A Group of People.

Google Chrome

  • Click the main menu in the top-right (represented by three vertical dots) and choose Settings.
  • Scroll down and click the link that says Show advanced settings…
  • Immediately under the Privacy section click the Content settings... button.
  • Scroll down to the Pop-ups section and leave the setting at Do not allow any site to show pop-ups.
  • Click the Manage exceptions... button.
  • Add heritage.populiweb.com to the list of exceptions.  Ensure the behaviour is set to Allow and click Done.
  • You’re done.

Microsoft Edge

If you are using Microsoft Edge, it seems to handle the exception even with Pop-up blocker enabled.  If you are using Internet Explorer, I would suggest migrating to Microsoft Edge.

Add a New Site to IIS Reverse Proxy with Application Request Routing

General Overview of steps.

  • Install the security certificate in IIS.
  • Add a new site.  The web root should be an arbitrary folder in wwwroot\reverse.
  • Add two site bindings.  One for HTTP and one for HTTPS.  Specify a hostname.  For HTTPS Require Server Name Indication.  Specify the SSL certificate you imported earlier.
  • Create or Ensure that the web server that is hosting the site is available through Server Farms (application request routing).
  • Click on the top-level Web server tree (Sombrero) and then open on URL  Rewrite.
  • There should be a rule for each server farm.  If there is not a rule for this server farm, add one.  Rule settings are below.
    • Requested URL: Matches Pattern
    • Using: Wildcards
    • Pattern: *
    • Under Conditions, add a new condition and specify the new application or site’s domain name as the pattern.  The condition input should be {HTTP_HOST}.
    • Action Type: Route to Server Farm
      • Scheme: https://
      • Server Farm: the farm were the application/site is hosted.

Bad Gateway 502 Error

Once the reverse proxy is setup on Sombrero and the traffic forwarded to the back-end server, there have been instances where navigating to the site produces a Bad Gateway 502 error.  This is usually caused by an mismatch of the principal name used in the certificate on the back-end server and the domain name used in reverse proxy rule on Sombrero.

Most recently, when setting up https://finance.heritageapps.ca I ran into this issue.  The root cause was sourced to a mismatch of the domain name used in the server farm where the rule was pointed to.  I was using the internal domain name of the internal server, which in this case was tripping up IIS and causing the bad gateway error.  To fix this, I used split DNS (which I had already setup) for the heritageapps.ca domain.  Internally I point the same domain (finance.heritageapps.ca) to the back-end server.  So, I just used this same name in the server farm configuration to point to my internal server.