IIS 6 Administration

To finish off, there are a few standard Windows commands that are sometimes useful for managing certain aspects of IIS. For example, I talked earlier in this chapter about using the net start and net stop commands to start and stop IIS services. Other net commands are also useful at times:

• net localgroup Adds a user account to the IIS_WPG group, to which accounts used as application pool identities must belong.

• cacls Captures a list of all NTFS permissions on your server, which can help you troubleshoot if things go wrong.

• convlog Converts IIS log files to NCSA format.

Furthermore, certain resource kit utilities may also be useful:

• auditpol Modifies audit policies from the command line.

• secedit Manages security templates on the system.

• showmbrs Displays members of security groups that have permissions on directories and files.

Also included in the \Support\Tools folder of your Windows Server 2003 CD-ROM is httpcfg.exe, a command-line tool that lets you configure the IP Listen List of http.sys, which is the IIS 6 alternative to socket pooling in IIS 5.

You are an admin who has a strong Unix background, and you want to be able to manage your IIS machines remotely from the command line as much as possible. What kind of tasks can you perform this way? What tasks will require access to the GUI instead? Why might it be worthwhile for you to take the time to learn how WMI works and how to write scripts using Visual Basic Scripting Edition?