IT Pro Tips : IIS 7.0

Heterogeneous Web Workloads on IIS7

itprotipsadmin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:01:00 GMT

By Michael K. Campbell

One of the great things about IIS 7 is that it provides an entirely new architecture – which enables it to finally treat all application platforms as first-class citizens. For example, with IIS 6 ASP.NET (Microsoft’s own flagship web development platform) was effectively a bolt-on afterthought that was implemented as an ISAPI filter. This meant that authentication, authorization, and handler mappings were duplicated. This, obviously, resulted in additional processing, complexity, and a larger attack surface. The same was roughly true of PHP on IIS 6, as it too was implemented as an ISAPI filter.

With IIS 7, all of that changes, and virtually all web platforms can now be treated as first-class citizens that can be easily plugged into IIS 7’s integrated pipeline through simple handler mappings and minor configuration changes.

In Installing ASP, ASP.NET and PHP/FastCGI Applications on IIS 7 you can easily get a great overview of the full degree and impact of this new functionality by engaging in a quick hands-on lab that lets you take everything for a painless test drive. As such, this is a great lab if you’ve only heard about these new features (and haven’t had a chance to play around with them yet), or if you’ve never heard of these new capabilities (as the lab does a great job of walking you through these new improvements).

The lab itself starts off with a simple overview of creating and debugging a very simple classic ASP website.

What helps make this lab great is that it’s perfectly geared toward folks who haven’t had any hands-on experience with IIS 7 because it deftly guides users through great little changes and additions to the IIS 7 management interfaces, while showcasing how to configure heterogeneous workloads.

TIP: If you haven't played around with IIS 7 yet, pay attention to how many (or few) wizard pages you must "click through" to create a new website with IIS 7.

Of course, one of the highlights of this lab is where it walks you through how easy it is to handle PHP requests with FastCGI/PHP installed on your hosting machine. (On IIS 6 configuring PHP wasn’t exactly brain-surgery, but it also wasn’t high on anyone’s list of things they wanted to do given the number of configuration tweaks that needed to be made. With IIS 7 you can now configure PHP to run faster and better than ever in just a couple mouse-clicks, or even from the command prompt if you prefer the ninja approach.)

When it came to the ASP.NET functionality, I was really expecting something pretty tame. But this lab went the extra mile by providing a walkthrough where you configure a site to run that was developed for IIS 6. Now, the vast majority of sites designed for IIS 6 will work without any issues, configuration changes, or extra ‘effort’ on IIS 7 – as it was designed to allow the greatest degree of compatibility possible. But, obviously, with all the new functionality provided by IIS 7, there are going to be a few cases where sites run into issues.

Happily though, this lab purposefully models one of those edge cases, and then walks you through what you’ll need to do with problematic sites to get them to run flawlessly on IIS 7 by switching them into ‘classic’ (or compatibility) mode.

The lab then concludes by showcasing just how powerful IIS 7 is by walking you through the process of firing off a .bat file that interacts with the new IIS 7 management APIs to add a shared header and footer on the ASP, ASP.NET, and PHP sites that you created during the lab.

In all I guess what I liked so much about Installing ASP, ASP.NET and PHP/FastCGI Applications on IIS 7 is that it does such a great job of showing off some of the great new functionalities and capabilities provided by IIS 7 that make it such a great application server for all sorts of web workloads. Best of all, this lab shows you just what’s possible in a short amount of time and, in a way, that helps you instantly ‘get it’ when it comes to new features and options.

Installation and the New Modular Architecture

itprotipsadmin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:01:00 GMT

By David Chernicoff

TechNet Virtual Lab: Installation and the New Modular Architecture walks the user through examining the roles installed on an IIS 7 server and gives the user the opportunity to install additional server roles.

This 45 minute Virtual Lab uses Server manager and Internet Information Services manager to walk the user through the process of installing a service on IIS. The lab uses the Shared Hosting Guidelines Roles Service as the example for this process.

The information presented in Installation and the New Modular Architecture helps the IIS administrator understand the advanced roles concepts and demonstrates the ease of use that the modular architecture of IIS 7 provides for configuring web servers in specific roles.

TIP: For users planning on deploying on Windows Server 2008, the lab has an optional component that walks the user through installing IIS 7 on a Server Core installation of Windows Server.

Rapid Troubleshooting with IIS 7 Failed Request Tracking

itprotipsadmin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By David Chernicoff

Rapid Troubleshooting with IIS 7 Failed Request Tracking gives IIS administrators a hands-on look at configuring and using the failed request tracking feature in IIS 7 by setting up scenarios in which the feature can be used to diagnose problems with an IIS 7 site.

In this lab the user starts by creating the conditions necessary to utilize the failed tracking request feature. This provides end-to-end information to the user about not only the task at hand but the conditions necessary to utilize the tools.

From the basics on using the tool to setting up custom tracking rules, the lab gives the user the hands-on knowledge necessary to use the tool in their own environment.

The information presented in TechNet Virtual Lab: Rapid Troubleshooting with IIS 7 Failed Request Tracking simplifies the process for a new user of the tracking tool to familiarize themselves with how the tool works and what type of workflow improvements can be gained by utilizing the tool’s features.

TIP: Make sure you examine the current state of the lab when you initially start it. Many times the lab manual will walk you through the setup steps that have already been accomplished prior to your entry into the virtual lab space. Attempting to follow the setup directions exactly, when the steps have been done, can take you off track and make the lab less useful.

IIS 7 Configuration and Administrative Delegation

itprotipsadmin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By Michael K. Campbell

One of the best things about IIS 7 is that it makes exclusive use of .config files to store all server, site, and application settings. This means that configuration with IIS 7 has truly become portable, and that backing up your ‘metabase’ now consists solely of making backups of the necessary .config files. If you haven’t had time to look into these new features yet, then a quick and comprehensive way to get a feel for exactly how configuration has changed with IIS 7 is to check out the Using the New IIS7 Configuration System Featuring Delegated and Remote Administration lab. Yeah, the name is a bit long and over-the-top, but it perfectly describes what you’ll learn with this quick and easy lab.

The lab itself starts off by having you create a backup using APPCMD.exe. Then, it jumps right in to exposing you to IIS 7’s new .config files and functionality.

This lab is really well thought out and gives you great and instant insights into how IIS 7 uses .config files by showing you how actions that you take in Internet Information Services Manager correspond to changes made, or reflected, in corresponding .config files.

Of course, the lab also makes sure to expose you to how changes made in .config files (i.e. manually typed, or entered, changes) end up being reflected in Internet Information Systems Manager as well. The lab also does a great job of showing you the relationship between individual Web.Config files and the sites that you see displayed in IIS Manager.

TIP: This lab also gives you a great tip on how to know which files you're currently adding.

Once the lab is finished covering the basics of editing and managing .config files, it then transitions to full-blown admin tasks and showcases one of my favorite new features of IIS 7: the ability to simply copy and paste .config files from one server to another.

At one point the lab also walks you through the execution of a .bat file that creates a handful of sites and then gets positively cool when it shows you how to back up your configuration with all of those sites in place. Then it shows how to get rid of all of the new sites by using AppCmd.exe’s Restore functionality (which just copies and pastes backup copies of your .config files back over the top of current .config files.)

From there, the lab turns its attention to showcasing delegation features and provides a high-level overview of the types of administrative functions that you can delegate.

It then walks you through the creation of a new site where you can set up delegation options and even gives you the chance to see what happens when you try to modify configuration settings in the .config files when you don’t have the necessary permissions.

The lab then transitions to showing you how to enable remote administration functionality by walking you through the process of enabling the IIS Management Service. This process helps in determining what kinds of access types you want to allow, and then creating your own IIS Manager User Accounts in order to allow remote users to access administrative capabilities without requiring Domain or Local user accounts.

Of course, once you’ve made those configuration changes to IIS, the lab walks you through the process of connecting to the site remotely where you can start playing around with some of the configuration options on your own – in order to constrain or enable configuration options by remote users.

So, if you’re looking for a way to lighten the administrative load around managing web workloads, IIS 7 has a number of insanely great options available to you – and Using the New IIS7 Configuration System Featuring Delegated and Remote Administration is a great lab that will expose those options to you in just a few minutes and give you great insights into just what’s possible.

IIS7 Remote Management

itprotipsadmin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By Michael K. Campbell

Windows Server 2008 is something that I’ve watched with great anticipation over the past few years, and I still find it hard to believe that Windows 2008 Server is finally available in non-beta form. And while there are a number of reasons why I’m really excited about Windows Server 2008, one of the biggest has to be the inclusion of IIS 7 – because of all of the benefits that it provides. In the Lab: Allowing External Users to Manage IIS7 Web Applications, you can take a quick peek at how IIS 7 will improve administration by making Remote Admin capabilities easily and securely available.

Because of the tight focus of this lab, there isn’t any introductory video – just a few paragraphs for you to read about some of the problems associated with accessing web servers remotely. This means that you’ll find yourself looking at a blank lab environment right off the bat.

But that’s actually great as the lab gets you started immediately on enabling IIS 7 Feature Delegation, and starting the IIS 7 Management Service – which provides the Remote Admin functionality covered in this lab.

The lab then jumps right in to showing you how to create permissions and access rules for IIS Manager Users. Best of all, it does a great job of showing you how you can use IIS Manager without creating domain or local accounts.

TIP: IIS Manager keeps track of its own credentials and authentication scheme to lessen management constraints- and this lab shows you how to create those kinds of user accounts.

Once you’ve created some access rules, the lab then walks you through how to access the site, and guides you through the process of evaluating what kind of functionality you can expect by default when connecting to IIS 7 remotely.

Finally, the lab concludes with an overview of how RemoteApp and the TS Gateway functionality in Windows Server 2008 can be coupled with RDP 6 Clients to help make IIS Manager available through firewalls over HTTPS for real-life Remote Access.

All in all, Allowing External Users to Manage IIS7 Web Applications is a great way to quickly get your hands on some new IIS 7 functionality. If you haven’t seen much about IIS 7 or seen Remote Administration in action, then you need to check out this lab as it provides a really quick, easy, and painless way to get a feel for how IIS 7 can drastically improve web application management.

IIS 7.0 (part 4 of 4): Diagnostics

itprotipsadmin — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By David Chernicoff

Internet Information Services 7.0 (Part 4 of 4): Diagnostics is the last of a four part series of presentations on getting the most from IIS 7.0. This section, called “Diagnostics” does a good job of standing on its own, and the presenter reviews a couple of key IIS concepts germane to the topic to make the presentation useful in and of itself.

The presentation does a good job of explaining how and where the tracing and status tools and API set apply and can be used by the IIS developer.

A high level overview of how these pieces work is the key to this presentation. It puts everything into context and gives the application developer and IIS administrator a clear idea of how to troubleshoot applications running on their web servers.

The information presented in Internet Information Services 7.0 (Part 4 of 4): Diagnostics makes it very clear that a properly coded application running on IIS can be fairly simple to troubleshoot if the appropriate tools are used.

TIP: Look for the quiz-type review slides to help differentiate between similar sounding techniques and problem areas.

Automating IIS 7.0 Management

itprotipsadmin — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By Michael K. Campbell

More than any product that has come out of Microsoft in awhile, I’m very excited about Windows Server 2008; mostly because of just how great Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 is. I’ve been using IIS 7 for a number of years along with ASP.NET, and the new IIS 7 architecture goes leaps and bounds towards making ASP.NET a first-class application, and does the same for PHP and virtually all other web workloads. It also offers a number of really cool and exciting management options – including a completely re-written MMC, and the ability to delegate approved admin functionality to trusted parties.

In Automating Internet Information Services 7.0, you can also get a good overview of some of the scripting, automation, and remote management options for IIS 7.

Based upon some of the introductory information and abstracts about this webcast, I assumed that much of it would be old news to me as I’ve actually presented on some of the automation and scripting benefits provided by IIS 7 at a few road-shows in the past. And, while much of it was new for me, I found that there were some great “unexpected” tidbits in this webcast as well. So if IIS 7 scripting and management is “old-hat” to you as well, you’ll still find some things worth your while in this webcast. Even better, if IIS 7 automation is something you aren’t familiar with and which you’re contemplating with the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008, then this webcast will give you a great overview of some of the options and possibilities available to you.

This webcast quickly gets to work outlining some of the benefits and specifics of an entirely new approach to IIS 7 management with a new managed-code administration API that Microsoft will be releasing this year (known as MWA):

The webcast then drops into a couple of demonstrations of how to use this new API from PowerShell:

Interestingly enough, the demo actually goes wrong for a second – at least initially. But as much as I hate that when I’m presenting, I usually find that when that happens and I’m observing, I usually learn more – as many of the assumptions that the presenter is making frequently become “unmasked”. That was definitely the case here.

TIP: PowerShell requires that the MWA assemblies be explicitly loaded into PowerShell before you can use it - and this webcast shows you (in a couple of places) how to dynamically load CLR assemblies into PowerShell using System.Net.Reflection.

Along with showing how to use the new MWA Management Provider from the PowerShell command prompt, this webcast also outlines some tips and best practices for using this up-and-coming management interface. It also provides some high level information about extending MWA as well.

At a few points during the demonstration, the presenter quickly moved past some new FTP management instrumentation in the IIS Manager GUI, but then came back to those new points and talked for a few minutes about how FTP is going to be integrated into the release builds – as well as how to get those builds now. I thought this was pretty cool because I’ve just been too busy of late to get out and look at these new FTP improvements in the latest builds – but they’re something that I’ve been definitely interested in given how easy FTP management will end up being under IIS 7.

True to the name of this webcast, it also displays some high-level overviews of how to utilize WMI and AppCmd.exe to manage IIS 7. In addition to showing simple demos of how to use these tools from the command line, this presentation also explains some of the pain points that these tools try to address and how they’re intended to improve in the future (specifically WMI and PowerShell2).

One part of this presentation that I really liked though was a section detailing how to use batch files with AppCmd:

It was nice to see some simple examples of how that’s done and caused me to think about ways that I could leverage batch files (with optional parameters) written against AppCmd to meet my own needs.

TIP: AppCmd batch files created on Windows 2008 hosts can be moved onto Server Core deployments and used there to help automate common interactions.

This presentation also touches a good deal on managing Server Core deployments (where there is no GUI), and offers some great insights. Likewise, the presenter also provides some best practices for Server Core Management – including an overview of why you want to use OCList and OCSetup to manage Server Core features instead of using Package Manager.

Then, to top everything off, this presentation finishes with some high-level overviews and ideas about how to manage remote deployments – covering specifics about which kinds of operations are supported or not through a handful of remote management scenarios.

If you’re new to IIS 7 or scripting automation and remote management, or you want to learn more about the release dates of the new IIS FTP builds or the new and upcoming Web Management APIs, then head over and watch the Automating Internet Information Services 7.0 webcast.

IIS-Core Server

itprotipsadmin — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By Will Kelly

I was drawn to the IIS-Core Server virtual lab after poking around the IIS 7.0 specifications and began to wonder about the development options including .NET and Native C/C++ modules. However, I needed a “sandbox” to play in since my dev environment was devoted to a client project and a lab manual that was detailed enough to serve as a reference down the road.

Download the lab manual and print it out because it contains the lab exercises. It can also be a useful reference to you later on.

The lab starts off with an introduction that sets the stage for the lab and a section that offers a useful review about Basic Authentication.

After the introductory and refresher material about Basic Authentication, the lab delves into its first task—Developing a Module with .NET. The lab takes the time to first examine the development of a basic authentication module that supports the http1.1 basic authentication scheme. This module uses the standard ASP.NET module pattern that has been available since ASP.NET v1.0 and the very same pattern is used to build ASP.NET modules that extend the IIS7 server. This direct approach into IIS7 Server development was most helpful to me.

After creating the class, the lab wastes no time and walks you through implementation of the Init method with registering the module for one or more request pipeline events.

Next the lab tackles how to create the AuthenticateUser method. This is an important step because at the end of this processing, if the module was successfully able to obtain and validate the user credentials, it will produce an authenticated user principal that other modules and application codes can later use in access control decisions.

After creating the AuthenticateUser method, it’s time to implement the IssueAuthenticationChallenge method following the lab’s methodical approach to module development.

The final element of the first task takes you through how to create utility methods.

The second task of the lab walks through deploying the module to the application by first presenting the options you have for deploying the module to the application. Deployment in a production environment leaves no room for experimentation so I enjoyed being able to test out various module deployment methods within the lab’s “sandbox” because I was able to play to my heart’s content.

Source code is a must have in programming labs, and the lab finishes off with appendices including the Basic Authentication Module Source Code and other supplementary information that can help fuel more ideas and show you the true power of developing for the IIS environment. You can walk through the lab yourself here:

IIS 7.0 -Core Server Virtual Lab

End-to-End Overview of the Microsoft Internet Information Services 7

itprotipsadmin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By Mark Burnett

I recently took some time to catch up with some TechNet webcasts and there was one, the End-to-End Overview of the Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0, which I found particularly interesting. The webcast, given by Keith Combs, covers the significant structural changes that Internet Information Services (IIS) have undergone since the release of IIS 6 with Windows Server 2003. The webcast does a great job of showing how specific weaknesses in IIS 6 lead directly to the structural changes in IIS 7.

The most noteworthy of the features the webcast covers are the new modular structure, improved extensibility, and the overhauled configuration capabilities if IIS 7.

In the webcast, Keith does an interesting demonstration of how much granular control you have over what modules load in IIS 7. Not only is this important for performance and scalability reasons, but also for security. IIS 5 had such a poor security reputation because each vulnerability affected millions of servers that had all features enabled by default. IIS 7 keeps exposure to a minimum with its modular architecture.

Another important point Keith brings up is the fact that fewer modules loaded means a reduced effort for patch management.

A good portion of the webcast is demos, which makes the point so much better than bullet lists on PowerPoint slides. Keith walks through managing and configuring IIS 7 using the command line, through config files, and using the newly redesigned Internet Information Services Manager.

The webcast provides a great coverage of how IIS 7 works, only a small part of which I have mentioned here. It is well worth your time to go through the webcast End-to-End Overview of the Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0.

The unique features of the webcast format allow you to jump around, adjust the presentation speed, or even repeat a section if you didn’t quite get it the first time around. I used to only learn software by firing it up and using it but after watching this webcast, I feel like I already have done just that.