1.3.1- Working with IIS 5.0

Working with IIS 5.0

Having installed IIS 5.0 web server software onto our machine, we'll need some means of administrating its contents and settings. In this section, we'll meet the user interface that is provided by IIS 5.0.

In fact, some versions of IIS 5.0 provide two user interfaces, which come from PWS and the earlier versions of IIS – the two Microsoft web servers that existed in the time before Windows 2000. The Personal Web Manager was distributed with PWS, and is still supported by IIS 5.0 in some versions of Windows 2000. The Microsoft Management Console is a generic way of managing all sorts of services, and is often preferred. Let's take a quick look at both of them.

The Microsoft Management Console (MMC)

The beauty of the MMC is that it provides a central interface for administrating all sorts of services that are installed on your machine. We can use it to administrate IIS – but in fact, when we use it to administrate other services, the interface will look roughly the same. The MMC is provided as part of the Windows 2000 operating system – in fact, the MMC also comes with older Windows server operating systems.

IIS Administration using the MMC

The MMC itself is just a shell – on its own, it doesn't do much at all. If we want to use it to administer a service, we have to add a snap-in for that service. The good news is that IIS 5.0 has its own snap-in – the idea is that we snap the snap-in into the empty MMC shell, and it's this that allows us to administrate IIS. Let's take a look at it.

2.    Before we snap in the IIS snap-in, we need to locate it. The IIS 5.0 snap-in is encapsulated in a file called iis.msc, which should be contained in your \WinNT\system32\inetsrv directory. Have a look for it now; and if it's not there, open your Windows Explorer and use the Search facility (at View | Explorer Bar | Search) and make a note of its location.

Having opened the IIS snap-in within the MMC, you can perform all of your web management tasks from this window. The properties of the web site are accessible via the Default Web Site node. We'll be using the MMC more a little later in the chapter. Before that, we'll take a look at the Personal Web Manager.

To avoid the inconvenience of stepping through this process each time you need to administrate IIS, you could choose to create a shortcut. To do this, use Windows Explorer to navigate to the iis.msc file. Then right-click on iis.msc, and select Create Shortcut – this creates a new shortcut (called Shortcut to iis.msc) in the same folder. Finally, drag the new shortcut from the Explorer window onto the desktop. You can rename the shortcut if you like.

The Personal Web Manager (PWM)

If you're running Windows 2000 Professional, then there's another user interface to IIS – the Personal Web Manager (PWM). The PWM was the interface of PWS, Microsoft's web server for use on Windows 95/98 and Windows NT Workstation. It seems Microsoft has assumed that any users of these older Windows systems who decide to upgrade will choose to Windows 2000 Professional edition – because PWM is not available on other editions of Windows 2000.

Which IIS User Interface Should I Use?

Depending on which version of Windows you're using, you might not have a choice. If you're using an older version of Windows, or one of the 'higher-end' versions of Windows 2000, then your choice will probably be restricted to one.

What if you do have an option? The MMC-based admin tool for IIS – the IIS snap-in – provides a richer interface than the PWM, and provides services not only for web pages, but also for FTP sites (enabling the transfer of files from one site to another), NNTP (newsgroup) services and video and audio services. The MMC is designed to integrate seamlessly with many of Microsoft's other products, including the database facilities of SQL Server, the management facilities of Site Server, and the emailing and messaging abilities of Exchange. For this reason, we'll be using the MMC-based interface in this book.

Working with IIS 6.0

To manage IIS 6.0 in Windows Server 2003, open the Start menu, select Administrative Tools, and click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

Working with IIS7.0

IIS 7.0 introduces a new management console called the IIS Manager. To install this

1. Open then Control Panel and start Programs and Features.
2. Click Turn Windows features On or Off
3. Expand the Internet Information Services branch then expand the Web Management Tools branch.
4. Finally click the IIS Management Console checkbox to select it and click OK.
   

 To use this IIS 7 manager open the Start menu, choose All Programs, Administrative Tools, IIS Manager.