I'm having a very weird issue related to Portal aliases and I'm hoping someone can shed some light.


My site:
    Windows 2003 R2 server
    IIS 6
    DNN 5.6.0 Community

This site is an Intranet site with 1 portal for a very large chemical company. The site has been up and running for several years now. And I will add with very little issues.

But recently something behind the covers is creating aliases for my site.

My site should only contains 3 aliases:
     bpslpweb1/bpslp
     bpslpweb1.na.basf.com/bpslp
     localhost/bpslp

But something keeps adding the following aliases. This list is not all inclusive. There are actually about 75 aliases.

bpslpweb1.na.basf.com/bpslp/portals/0/bps lp/research/local innovation/bpsu/schedule draft ver5.bmp
bpslpweb1/bpslp/images/icon_configuration_16px.png
bpslpweb1/bpslp/portals/_default/skins/bps lp/images/body_bg.png
bpslpweb1.na.basf.com/bpslp/communications/latestvideos/projectmaltadec2010/tabloid/1260/language/en-us
bpslpweb1.na.basf.com/bpslp/communications/latestvideos/projectmaltadec2010/tabloid/en-us
bpslpweb1.na.basf.com/bpslp/portals/_default/skins/bps lp/images/submenu_hover.png
bpslpweb1/bpslp/portals/_default/skins/bps lp/images/bpslpintranetbanner-top.png
bpslpweb1.na.basf.com/bpslp/communications/latestvideos
bpslpweb1/bpslp/portals/_default/skins/bps lp/images/bpslpintranetbanner-center.png
bpslpweb1/bpslp/portals/_default/skins

Most of these aliases point to an image or graphics file and several are video files.
I go into Site Settings/Portal Aliases and manually delete them but within a few hours they are back.

Is this a bug?.... a virus?   A full scan of the server reports no viruses, trojans, spyware, etc...
There is also no recorded activitiy in any of the DNN or WC3 logs.
 
It looks like a schedule event may be behind this, but I do not see any unusal scheduled jobs.

I don't know how long this issue has been occurring. I only noticed it a couple of days ago.
Maybe this is a clue to the issue... The only change to the site (other than the upgrade from DNN 5.5.1 to DNN 5.6.0) was an update to the latest version of the Document Exchange product. I believe it's 5.4.3. I have posted this issue on the vendors website as well.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave Davis

This is one un-intended side effect of the automatic portal alias mapping which was introduced in DotNetNuke 5.06.00 through changes to the code of the URLRewriteModule. It occurs if you have mapped image file extensions (such as .png) to ASP.Net or have (when running on IIS 7 or 7.5) include the attribute runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" on the <modules> node of the <system.webServer> section of web.config. As I recall, the Document Exchange module does modify web.config in such a manner.

The only viable workarounds are to either modify the URLRewriteModule.vb code or wait for DotNetNuke 5.06.01 to become available sometime in January (a beta is available now for testing purposes only - see http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/B...). In DNN 5.06.01, ".png" and ".txt" file extensions have been added to those already excluded from further processing by the URLRewriteModule. A setting to disable automatic portal alias mapping has also been added. You could also remove the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests attribute if it has been set to "true" in your site's web.config but that will cause extensions which rely on that behavior to fail.

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Bill, WESNet Designs
Team Lead - DotNetNuke Gallery Module Project (Not Actively Being Developed)
Extensions Forge Projects . . .
Current: UserExport, ContentDeJour, ePrayer, DNN NewsTicker, By Invitation
Coming Soon: FRBO-For Rent By Owner

the problem with this feature is the missing option to opt out (though we asked for it from the beginning).

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Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

   

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