IIS

I am a firm believer in trying to keep things simpler where ever possible (but not for the sake of it) In years gone by I have heard many admins lament about the complexities of deploying IIS to work alongside third party plugins such as PHP. I can remember numerous occasions where I have wrestled with the config and “best practice”. I am however glad to say finally Microsoft have taken notice of this and produced a very simple and effective deployment toolkit.

Today I was configuring a new FTP server based on IIS7 (well, 7.5 technically as it’s a Server 2008 R2 host), and I wanted an easy way to add and remove allowed IP addresses based on either an XML config file or a CSV import. Customers’ IP addresses are added or removed regularly, but I didn’t want to have to update their details twice, once on the server and once in the documents.

So, you’ve installed a new server with Server 2008 R2 Core – what next? Logging on, you’re presented with a shiny command prompt, you can run notepad or regedit…but aside from that, where do you go from there? In the next few series of posts I’ll hopefully point out the basics, and some not so basics! In this post, I’m covering Installing the IIS web server (and a few useful bits) and managing it from the IIS Management Snap-in.

I’ve just upgraded to BE.Net 1.6, and I thought I’d migrate to GoDaddy’s IIS 7 servers at the same time. The theory is that this would be a an easy migration and I’d have the weekend to iron out any bugs. Not so. After testing on my local IIS 7 and working perfectly, I uploaded the updates to my live blog and hit the “Migrate to IIS 7” button, which promises it will be completed in 24h.

If you have an Alternate Access Mapping configured for a MOSS 2007 site with Integrated Authentication you might find that you get prompted for the DOMAIN\UserName and Password. After 3 attempts you get to a HTTP 401 error. This can be resolved by following the steps in MS KB 896861 HTH, Sam

Outlook Web access is a fantastic tool for our company, providing on-the-go access to people’s mailboxes - which is of course secured by SSL and uses Forms Based Authentication. Internally, we have an intranet portal that allows us to access the various systems - one of which is OWA. One of the stipulations for this internal portal is that it is all Single Sign On using NTLM authentication integrated authentication. This is where the problem lies because enabling OWA with Forms Based Authentication over SSL disables Integrated Authentication.

If you’ve logged onto the properties for your IIS install and found that the ASP.NET tab has mysteriously disappered, you can try a couple of things. Firstly, try re-registering ASP.NET with IIS using the ASPNET_REGIIS.exe located in the .NET installation folder: c:\WINDOWS\MICROSOFT.NET\framework\\aspnet_regiis -i   Chances are though, that it won't work, and that you can try and number of command using aspnet_regiis.exe or even uninstalling and reinstalling .NET and you won't actually fix the problem.