Managing Your Web Site with IIS 4.0

Web masters need tools that minimize the time they spend managing Web sites and Web applications from their Web servers. One of Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0's strengths is the ability to customize many of its features to ease this management burden. However, customizing can seem overwhelming at times. For example, when you first open the Internet Service Manager (ISM), IIS 4.0 presents you with a daunting set of options. To complicate matters, the options are context sensitive and change depending on your current selection. If you select an entry in the left pane of ISM, the toolbar displays one set of options; if you select an entry in the right pane, the toolbar displays another set of options.

IIS's context-sensitive environment takes some getting used to, but it can be extremely useful when you are working with Microsoft Management Console (MMC)­a central location for managing and changing IIS 4.0's various property pages and context menus­to manage your Web presence. (MMC stores the values for most of the IIS properties in the Metabase, a configuration store for IIS similar to the Windows NT Registry, at \WINNT\system32\inetsrv\metabase.bin. You need to back up the Metabase as you do the Registry.)

In previous articles, I introduced several new features that IIS 4.0 provides for systems administrators, software developers, and Web masters. In this article, I'll show you how to use some of IIS 4.0's features and options to help you manage your Web sites and servers, manage your Web applications, and improve the performance of your Web server.

Managing Web Sites and Servers
With IIS 4.0, you can manage features globally for an entire Web server or change a particular property for a specific Web site. With IIS, a Web site directory can inherit property values from a higher-level directory. This feature simplifies setting specific properties for an entire Web site and setting other properties for a particular portion of a site. For example, Screen 1, page 186, shows the Directory properties page for the sample ExAir Web site that comes with IIS 4.0. I've set specific properties for this Web site, including Index this directory (as Screen 1 shows). In the MMC view of the ExAir Web site, as you see in Screen 2, page 186, I can customize the settings for the Benefits directory. By right-clicking Benefits and selecting Properties from the context menu, I can clear the Index property check box. The net result of adjusting these two properties is that IIS will index every directory under the ExAir directory except the Benefits directory. Each directory inherits the settings from the ExAir master properties pages except the Benefits directory, which now has different settings from the ExAir directory.

I can also turn off the index feature for all parts of the ExAir Web site that I don't want to index. This feature makes managing the site easier and reduces the load on the Web server. The indexing property is just one of many properties you can change for directories.

You can change the default properties that all Web sites inherit by editing the master properties for the entire server. After you configure the default properties to your liking, IIS updates the properties for existing sites and will copy these global property settings when you create a new site. To change the default properties, you must use the master properties pages for the Web server. From the ISM, select the server and click the Properties icon, or right-click the server name and select Properties from the context menu. You will see the server properties page, as shown in Screen 3, page 186. If you select WWW Service from the Master Properties list and click Edit, you see the master property pages for the WWW service. You can change the master properties for other services by choosing the appropriate service from the Master Properties list in Screen 3.

After you change the master properties, you must click Apply or OK for the changes to take effect. If you modify the same properties for other Web sites on the same server, you will see a dialog box similar to the one shown in Screen 4. If you change more than one master property, you will see a dialog box for each property you change. This feature lets you selectively apply master property changes to specific sites.

You can see how master properties simplify managing properties for a collection of Web sites on a server. However, properties that contain a list of items instead of one value can be tricky because you can accidentally overwrite other settings. When you change a master property list item, changes that propagate to existing sites overwrite existing lists and you lose the settings for the entire list. To work around this situation, you need to

1. Write down changes you make to any master properties.
2. Note affected sites by performing a screen capture or writing down the names of the sites when the Inheritance Overrides dialog box displays for the list item.
3. Click Cancel on the Inheritance Overrides dialog box to abort the propagation process for any list items.
4. Edit the properties for each site you noted in step 2.

Using IIS 4.0's master properties feature, you can control more of your Web sites' functions than you can with IIS 3.0. For example, imagine that you need to know which sites on your Web server have changed a property from the master property default. To find out,

1. Edit the master properties for the Web site.
2. Change the property of interest to another value.
3. Note affected sites by performing a screen capture or writing down the names of the sites when you see the Inheritance Overrides dialog box.
4. Click Cancel on the Inheritance Overrides dialog box to abort the propagation process.
5. Edit the master properties, and change the property of interest back to the default value.

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