IIS 6 Administration

IIS Manager and many other administrative tools are available on machines running Windows Server 2003, enabling you to administer servers anywhere on your network. In many cases however, servers are kept in locked rooms to ensure their physical security, and it’s an inconvenience for an administrator to have to go to the server room to configure or restart a server. A preferable way of administering IIS machines and other servers is to install administrative tools on a workstation sitting in the administrator’s office, and Windows Server 2003 allows you to do this by installing the Windows  Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack on your workstation. There are several caveats, however:

• You can’t install the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack on any Windows 2000 computer, regardless of whether it’s Server, Advanced Server, or Professional. This means you can’t use the MMC to administer Windows Server 2003 machines from a Windows 2000 computer, which is unfortunate (but probably part of Microsoft’s marketing strategy for nudging users toward the new platform). If you want to administer Windows Server 2003 machines from Windows 2000 computers, you need to use Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Administration) instead. However, this is only a workaround because TSA is not a practical solution for performing concurrent administration tasks on a number of servers—multiple TSA sessions consume a lot more overhead than using a single MMC console does.

• You can install the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack on a Windows XP Professional workstation (providing it has Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed), but it doesn’t give you a complete set of MMC consoles for administering your Windows Server 2003. In particular, the IIS Manager console is missing and so is the Internet Information Services snap-in, so you can’t administer IIS 6 servers from an administrator workstation running Windows XP. Service Pack 2 for Windows XP is expected to solve this problem and allow the complete slate of Windows Server 2003 administrative consoles to be installed on Windows XP workstations; but until this service pack is released, you’ll have to use Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) to manage IIS 6 machines from a Windows XP desktop.

The only solution at present to this dilemma is for administrators to install a Windows Server 2003 member server in their office as an administrator workstation (a domain controller has too much overhead), and then install the Windows  Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack on this machine. The reason you have to go the extra step of installing the Administration Tools Pack on your member server is that by default the only administrative consoles installed on a server are those needed for managing the services installed on that server. For example, if you have a member server that doesn’t have the DNS service installed on it, the DNS console will not be installed in the Administrative Tools program group. Also, the DNS snap-in will not be available on the machine, so you won’t be able to create a new MMC console for managing DNS servers either. The reason this snap-in is not installed on the member server is because it requires the DLL dnsmgr.dll in \System32 to function, and this DLL is not installed on a member server unless you install the DNS service on that server. However, by installing the Administration Tools Pack on your Windows Server 2003 member server, you install all the administrative DLLs and snap-ins, and you get all of the administrative consoles installed in the Administrative Tools program group. This allows you to manage any Windows Server 2003 from the member server in your office.

So let’s do it. To install the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack on a Windows Server 2003 member server, log on to that machine using the local Administrator account (or use the runas command), insert the Windows Server 2003 product CD, and browse the \I386 folder on the CD to locate the file adminpak .msi. This is a Windows Installer Package that can be installed by right-clicking it and selecting Install (alternatively, you could switch to the \I386 directory from the command line and type adminpak.msi to start the installation). The Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack Setup Wizard then leads you through the process of installing the Windows Server 2003 tools on your machine. If you select Start | Administrative Tools, you should see the complete slate of administrative consoles installed on your machine, and you will be able to administer any aspect of all Windows Server 2003 machines on your network from the member server in your office.