Enabling ASP.NET Session State without Installing IIS

At a client site, I needed to enable within a web cluster the ASP.NET session state service (ASP.NET State Service) and initially this was going to go on one server within the web cluster. The only problem though, as this configuration is easy, was what happens if the one server in the cluster that this is running on is the server that fails!

The solution we decided was to place the service on the SQL Server back-end database. Though this is not clustered (as it is not mission critical), if the database is unavailable then so is the application so why not run the ASP.NET State Service on that machine.

So we changed the web.config file to read:

<sessionState mode="StateServer" cookieless="false" stateConnectionString="tcpip=db_server:42424"/>

We went to the SQL Server (which was running Windows Server 2003 and so had the .NET Framework installed), but found that the service did not exist as ASP.NET was not installed.

So we ran the following, which claims to require IIS to be installed, but successfully enabled the ASP.NET State Service:

aspnet_regiis -i (this is in WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\version folder

Set “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ aspnet_state \ Parameters \ AllowRemoteConnection” to 1 on the server in the above step, set the service to Automatic and started it running.

And it all worked fine.