How to prevent IIS from overriding the culture set in ASP.NET

asp.netiis-6

I have a client in the US that wants all time displayed as military time, but everything else is supposed to be US Culture.

In my global.asax I am creating a copy of the US culture and applying the GB time display to create a US culture with Military time.

Reason I am doing this is I could not find a culture capable of it, however if anyone knows, that would be great.

The problem I am running into, is when we deploy the website to IIS (version 6), it all reverts back seemingly to US culture.

Looking up how to change the culture, I found the setting in ASP.NET Tab -> Edit Configuration -> Application Tab

Default value is af-ZA.

There seems to be no option to disable this overriding of culture, and I don't believe af-ZA is right anyways?

Is there a way to prevent IIS from overriding a culture programmatically set in ASP.NET?

Note: Asking here since I'm looking for server side solution, not programming one. Thanks!

Best Answer

This is at least partially a coding question. Basically, you need to create and register your new culture using the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class from System.Globalization.

Once registered, you can then choose your new culture within the ASP.Net application settings. (or within the web.config file for your application.)

Here are some references that should get you started:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172469.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureandregioninfobuilder.aspx

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I've run into this exact issue several times, and every time, the solution was to:

go to the Control Panel
go to the "Windows Components" area
remove IIS, let it uninstall
reboot
re-add IIS (make sure to include the ASP.NET stuff when you check off the boxes).
Run: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727>aspnet_regiis.exe -I

I spent hours debugging this at a client site once, and that was the trick. Since then, every time this has happened, this was the fix.

I'm not sure what the root cause is, but we tore the IIS configuration apart once trying to figure it out, and even had Microsoft RDC'ing into the server in question for 2 or 3 hours, and they couldn't help either.

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Your security department wants you to do this to make the server type harder to identify. This may lessen the barrage of automated hacking tools and make it more difficult for people to break into the server.

Within IIS, open the web site properties, then go to the HTTP Headers tab. Most of the X- headers can be found and removed here. This can be done for individual sites, or for the entire server (modify the properties for the Web Sites object in the tree).

For the Server header, on IIS6 you can use Microsoft's URLScan tool to remote that. Port 80 Software also makes a product called ServerMask that will take care of that, and a lot more, for you.

For IIS7 (and higher), you can use the URL Rewrite Module to rewrite the server header or blank it's value. In web.config (at a site or the server as a whole), add this content after the URL Rewrite Module has been installed:

<rewrite>    
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    <rule name="Remove Server header">
      <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_Server" pattern=".+" />
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  </outboundRules>
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You can put a custom value into the rewrite action if you'd like. This sample sourced from this article which also has other great information.

For the MVC header, in Global.asax:

MvcHandler.DisableMvcResponseHeader = true;

Edited 11-12-2019 to update the IIS7 info since the TechNet blog link was no longer valid.

Best Answer

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