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Forums Development and Extensions Building DNN Modules, Providers etc.

Strange Exceptions

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John A
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Posts: 78
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12/13/2022 11:31 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 \\ section in the application configuration.

In my web.config there is: 

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 <code>if(Session.Isavailable)</code> or something I can add to my function in programmatically?

Will Strohl
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12/13/2022 1:44 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. :)
John A
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Posts: 78
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12/13/2022 1:51 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
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12/13/2022 3:51 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.  

<code>(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"})</code>

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