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Strange Exceptions

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John A

Growing Member



Posts:78
Growing Member




12/13/2022 10:31 AM

    DNN 9.7.2 

    I am getting an exception usually at night on a new project of mine.  It is deployed to a hosting provider and visable to everyone.

    My exception is : Session state can only be used when enableSessionState is set to true, either in a configuration file or in the Page directive. Please also make sure that System.Web.SessionStateModule or a custom session state module is included in the <configuration>\<system.web>\<httpModules> section in the application configuration.

    In my web.config there is: <pages validateRequest="false" enableSessionState="true" enableViewStateMac="true" enableEventValidation="true" viewStateEncryptionMode="Always">

    The exception is happening while getting Session.SessionID within one of my modules.  This module is present on all pages in the application.

    The application runs fine when I am here at work - but a night when I am not here this happens. I also never got this error while running application on my local dev machine. So I suspect a bot.  Or possibly, hosting company shutting down services for some reason?

    Is there any way to prevent this from happening?  Like if(Session.Isavailable) or something I can add to my function in programmatically?






    Will Strohl

    Veteran Member



    Posts:1251
    Veteran Member




    12/13/2022 12:44 PM
      That's an interesting issue. Depending on the website, there can be all kinds of odd things that happen overnight. One thing that seems to help with this for me is to keep the website behind a WAF of some kind. Popular options include CloudFlare and Imperva. This will help protect your website from bots in general, especially if you opt for a paid plan.

      An extra step (beyond site-specific configuration options) that we always block any country that is not meant to use the website. This actually has a pretty good impact on things, despite it being easy to side-step that. I guess most bots don't try to get around that. :)
      Will Strohl

      Upendo Ventures Was my answer helpful to you? Please... Sponsor Us On GitHub ;)
      DNN experts since 2003 | We Build LOTS of DNN stuff...
      DNN-based E-Commerce w/ Hotcakes Commerce





      John A

      Growing Member



      Posts:78
      Growing Member




      12/13/2022 12:51 PM

        Thank you for reply,

        How in the world do you block an entire country - that is a good idea.  

        I just have a dedicated server running windows server 2019 with plesk - I know you can block per ip, but that would be allot of ips.  Especially Russia and China - which I would just love to block.






        Will Strohl

        Veteran Member



        Posts:1251
        Veteran Member




        12/13/2022 2:51 PM

          If you switch to using a WAF, then it's as simple as setting a firewall rule.  CloudFlare supports this scenario in its free plan (see the example screenshot below). 😊 

          When you're ready, you can add it to CloudFlare easily by copying and pasting the shortcode for it below.  

          (ip.geoip.country in {"AU" "AT" "BE" "BZ" "CA" "DK" "FI" "FR" "DE" "GL" "GU" "GR" "HU" "IS" "IE" "IM" "IT" "JP" "KR" "MX" "NL" "NZ" "NO" "PR" "ES" "SE" "CH" "UA" "GB" "US"})

          Will Strohl

          Upendo Ventures Was my answer helpful to you? Please... Sponsor Us On GitHub ;)
          DNN experts since 2003 | We Build LOTS of DNN stuff...
          DNN-based E-Commerce w/ Hotcakes Commerce
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