IIS 7 550 The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

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minditsolutions
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We have recently updated our web server to IIS 7.

When analyzing log files we get the following error:
550 The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

The error occurs when WebLog Expert is trying to download todays logfile, wich is in use by IIS7.

We have tried configuring IIS7 so that it is possible to download the log file without any luck. Others are also having this problem, but Microsoft seems not to take the problem seriously. For more information on the ISS7 FTP 550 issue, please use the following link: http://forums.iis.net/t/1159198.aspx

Anyone have a solution to this problem?
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Michael
It seems that the issue depends on what FTP server is used. The best known case is the standard IIS 7 FTP server. It returns the "550 The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process." error by default when the accessed file is used by another program. There is a setting that allows to change this behaviour but it seems that it doesn't work in some cases, you can find more information on it at http://forums.iis.net/t/1158270.aspx#B43 and http://forums.iis.net/t/1159198.aspx

As the error descriptions includes clear indication that the file is in use, WebLog Expert ignores such errors. As a result, there shouldn't be any problems when the IIS 7 FTP server is used, but there may be problems with other FTP servers while they can be probably fixed in some cases by changing server settings.
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rschletty
Well, I read those two forum threads and it is amazing that Microsoft would hobble wen log downloads like this, "by design." Incredible.

Thanks for shedding as much light as you are able on the issue. I wish WLE had a log selection option that could exclude a log with the current date, perhaps by comparing the log filename to the server's system time. This filter should be included in the wildcards section of WLE.
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Michael
Thank you for the suggestion, we'll consider adding support for exclusion of some log files from analysis.
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rschletty
Excellent! That would be an effective workaround. I had intuitively looked for that filtering option in WLE.

Much better than trying to schedule a server-side copy of a log in use. I don't believe I had that scripting option with WebSitePanel.
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Michael
We have added support for excluding files in version 7.7 beta 2. It is now possible to exclude a file name or wildcard with the # character before it along with the usual path to exclude the file(s). Here are two examples of FTP paths with exclusions:

/logs/*.*; #/logs/*.bak - analyze all files from the /logs folder except for files with the .bak extension.

/logs/*.log; #/logs/u_ex%yy%%mm%%dd%.log - analyze all .log files from the /logs folder except for today's one (date macros are used in this path).
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S.
Hi,
I am currently using 7.8 Standard Trial and I wanted to exclude *.current, as I am receiving 550 errors, too (accessable by Filezilla). whateverfile.current seems to be a symlink to access.log.week.dayofweek. Anyhow, I tried to do a "/logs/access.log.*; #/logs/*.current" to parse everything except /logs/*.current. It works when I write "#/logs/*.current", but it doesn't work, when I write the above quoted command. (Unfortunately %wy% doesn't work for me, too, as my hoster seems to have a off-by-one bug with naming the logs.) :-)
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Michael
Quote from S.
Hi,
I am currently using 7.8 Standard Trial and I wanted to exclude *.current, as I am receiving 550 errors, too (accessable by Filezilla). whateverfile.current seems to be a symlink to access.log.week.dayofweek. Anyhow, I tried to do a "/logs/access.log.*; #/logs/*.current" to parse everything except /logs/*.current. It works when I write "#/logs/*.current", but it doesn't work, when I write the above quoted command. (Unfortunately %wy% doesn't work for me, too, as my hoster seems to have a off-by-one bug with naming the logs.) :-)
It seems that the specified exclude mask doesn't match file name of the file that causes the problem. Could you please post the screenshot of the 550 error dialog? You can also send it to us privately to support@weblogexpert.com

BTW if your hoster have a shift in date when naming logs, you can try to write a wildcard like %wy-1% or similar, depending on how exactly log files are named. However, first of all it is necessary to check what is the name of the file shown in the error dialog.