Learning Windows Server 2003

8.4. Installing IIS

You can install IIS either from the Manage Your Server Wizard, which will set up IIS with default settings, or via the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel, which allows more granular control over what you install.

To install IIS using Add/Remove Programs, follow these steps:

1. Open the Control Panel, and double-click Add/Remove Programs.

2. In the left pane, click Add/Remove Windows Components.

3. Check the checkbox beside Application Server in the list. The Application Server selection box will appear.

4. Check the checkbox beside Internet Information Services (IIS), and click OK. For this example, we'll install just the basic components.

5. Click Next in the original dialog box to proceed to the file copy. You might be prompted to insert your Windows Server 2003 CD-ROM.

IIS is now installed on your computer. By default, IIS is set up with a basic HTTP service listening on port 80 of all IP addresses on your computer. This service will host only static web pages and text documentsno scripting is allowed out of the box as a security measure. A locked-down SMTP server is listening on port 25 of all IP addresses on the machine, ready to send mail. You get an NNTP server, without any feeds configured or local newsgroups set up, on port 119 of all IP addresses on your box. If you elect to install FrontPage Server Extensions during the setup process, you'll receive a default FTP site on port 21, and a specially created web site called Microsoft SharePoint Administration on a randomly assigned port on all IP addresses. The port is randomly assigned for security purposes so that attackers can't target the software interface on all computers using just a single port number.

8.4.1. IIS Management Console

You configure IIS-related services in Windows Server 2003 through the IIS Manager snap-in, as pictured in Figure 8-2.

To access the console, select Start All Programs Administrative Tools, and click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. You also can load the snap-in into an existing management console using its filename, iis.msc.

You'll see the available resources aggregated into three different groups: Application Pools, which are available only when IIS is running in worker process isolation mode (described earlier in this chapter); web sites, which are the standard method of serving static web pages and simple dynamic HTML-based pages to clients; and web service extensions, which handle the more complex, dynamically loaded content, as well as runtime languages such as ASP.NET and other similar languages.

You can configure a few options that will affect the behavior of all sites and extensions across IIS, and you can edit these by right-clicking your server name in the left pane of IIS Manager and selecting Properties. A dialog box will open with the following options:

Enable Direct Metabase Edit

Also called edit-while-running , this feature enables you to adjust the actual configuration of every aspect of IIS while the service is enabled. The metabase was previously an incomprehensible binary file that was subject to corruption very easily; in IIS 6, the metabase is now an XML file that the user can modify directly. With this feature enabled, you can edit the metabase directly with a text editor such as Notepad or Cooledit without having to stop the INETINFO service.

UTF-8 Logging

By selecting this option, you instruct IIS to write HTTP server logs in the UTF-8 character set rather than ASCII and/or the local character set as configured in the operating system. If you use Unix systems to process logs for your organization, this might be helpful for you. IIS does not support writing FTP log files in UTF-8 format.

MIME Types

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) types are mapped to individual file types and indicate what kinds of documents and data are served by the IIS machine. The MIME types defined in this box are served globallythat is, across all sites in the machine. You also can define specific MIME types for a virtual directory, a physical directory, and a specific web site. To configure these mappings, click the MIME Types button.