I'm using IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 with Service Pack 1 (SP1). To increase security, I'm trying to change the IUSR_servername account. When I delete this account, it reappears after I reboot the system. Have I discovered a bug?
You've discovered an undocumented feature that is new to IIS 5.0. Even if you rename the account, a new one will still appear after reboot. Microsoft documentation doesn't explain why this "feature" is implemented, and it's barely referenced in the README file installed with IIS. The only workaround is to create another account for Anonymous access that doesn't have IUSR in the name.
Every day, my company downloads Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files to clients. Can we stream the PDF files so that the clients can view the files as they download?
Yes, you can. PDF files are extremely useful for displaying precise renditions of online content, such as software documentation, custom reports, and even entire books. Unfortunately, Web servers and Web browsers don't natively support PDF files. Consequently, you need specialized software—Adobe Acrobat—to create and read PDF files.
Acrobat Reader is free, and installation is easy—there are no user-adjustable parameters. After you complete the Acrobat installation, Acrobat Reader integrates with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and is automatically called when you download a PDF file. Acrobat Reader is aptly named: It provides a read-only rendition of the PDF file that you can't modify in any way. This feature has obvious appeal to online publishers.
Acrobat Reader lets you view PDF files, but to create them, you must buy and install the full version of Acrobat. To create a PDF file in Acrobat, you simply copy the document onto the Acrobat icon, then print to a Monitored folder for automatic conversion or select Create Adobe PDF from a Microsoft Office application's File menu. Your PDF document will look the same on Windows, UNIX, and Macintosh systems.
Many companies use IIS as a vehicle to deliver PDF files to clients. Acrobat 4.0 includes a Save option called Optimize that lets you deliver PDF files one page at a time. To enable this functionality, click Save As and select the Optimize check box. If you don't select this option, clients must wait for the entire document to download. For more information about the Optimize feature, go to Adobe's Web site and search for byteserving.
Delivering prebuilt PDF files to clients isn't your only option. You can also develop PDF files on the fly. ActivePDF produces a set of server-side utilities that let you dynamically generate PDF files from Active Server Pages (ASP) or Cold Fusion. This capability lets you dynamically generate PDF files instead of simply delivering static files. This concept is similar to ASP versus HTML. Using ActivePDF, you can use write scripts to query a database and output results to a PDF file, which you then download and read into Acrobat Reader. You can find similar utilities at http://www.pdflib.com.
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out one more area in which PDF files concern IIS administrators. For Web sites with a volume of content, using Microsoft Index Server is a common way to provide search capabilities. Index Server will automatically index HTML and Office documents and provides a high-speed search engine with built-in interfaces to IIS. Natively, Index Server doesn't support searches for content that PDF files contain. To address this problem, Adobe has created an Index Server "filter" that enables Index Server to include PDF documents in the query returns. You can download the filter from http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/8122.htm.
After installing IIS 5.0, I discovered that the option to create new Web sites is missing from the New Tasks menu, which I accessed by right-clicking the server name in Internet Services Manager (ISM). IIS 5.0 is supposed to support multiple Web sites. How can I create a new Web site when the menu item is missing?
When you install the Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack on NT Workstation 4.0 or Windows 9x, you get Personal Web Server. PWS is basically a scaled-down version of IIS 4.0 that you can use to develop ASP files.
IIS 5.0 is integrated with Win2K, so you'll find IIS 5.0 on both the Win2K Server and Win2K Professional CD-ROMs. Now, however, when you install IIS 5.0 on Win2K Pro, you don't get PWS. Instead, you get a Web server called IIS 5.0. This discrepancy is confusing because many people incorrectly assume that the Win2K Server and Win2K Pro versions of IIS 5.0 offer the same features. This mistake is understandable because the servers have the same name, but they're not at all the same. One limitation of the Win2K Pro version of IIS 5.0 is that you can't create more than one Web site. Therefore, my guess is that you installed IIS 5.0 on Win2K Pro and expected to see a full-featured package. An IIS 5.0 implementation under Win2K Pro contains these additional limitations:
- You're limited to 10 simultaneous connections. Because a request to download a page can require multiple TCP sessions, this limitation actually translates to 40 connections.
- The Operators tab is unavailable. The Operators tab lets you specify which groups or users can administer a Web site. Because Win2K Pro isn't a server and doesn't support multiple Web sites, this features is unnecessary.
- You can't limit access based on IP address or domain name.
- On the Performance tab, you can't enable bandwidth throttling or process throttling. Therefore, you can't select the Enforce limits check box.
- Browser-based administration is unavailable because IIS 5.0 under Win2K Pro doesn't support the use of multiple virtual Web servers. A virtual web site is required to support the browser-based administrative tools.
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