Ten Things to Do With IIS

As an IIS administrator it sometimes gets downright annoying having to fend off all the insults from Apache admins I meet claming innate server superiority. Generally the discussion about Web administration starts first with all the various security holes plaguing IIS and the negative press the platform garnered over the last year. Then it invariably moves to a discussion about how Netcraft and other stats sites show Apache as the dominant server on the Web, or how a certain big site uses Apache, or how there are so many cool modules to add to Apache. Pointing out that scads of non-identified corporate in-house servers run IIS, or that it too is a free server (since it comes with the operating system), or that there are in fact plenty of cool add-ons for IIS (including many that provide source code) -- all this does little to dissuade these server chauvinists of their opinion. Rather than whining about rude Apache admins, however, I thought it would be a more useful response simply to write down some of the ways I've found of improving IIS. So without further delay here are my top ten tips for making the most of your IIS.

Tip 10: Customize Your Error Pages

    Although this is quite simple to do, few people seem to take advantage of it. Just select the "Custom Errors" tab in MMC and map each error, such as 404, to the appropriate HTML or ASP template. Full details can be found here. If you want an even easier solution -- or if you want to let developers handle the mapping without giving them access to the MMC -- use a product like CustomError.

Tip 9: Dive into the MetaBase

    If you think Apache is powerful because it has a config file, then take a look at the MetaBase. You can do just about anything you want with IIS by editing the MetaBase. For example, you can create virtual directories and servers; stop, start and pause Web sites; and create, delete, enable and disable applications.

Microsoft provides a GUI utility called MetaEdit, somewhat similar to RegEdit, to help you read from and write to the MetaBase. Download the latest version here. But to really impress those UNIX admins -- and to take full advantage of the MetaBase by learning how to manipulate it programmatically -- you'll want to try out the command-line interface, officially called the IIS Administration Script Utility. Its short name is adsutil.vbs and you'll find it in C:\inetpub\adminscripts, or else in %SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv\adminsamples, together with a host of other useful administrative scripts.

A word of caution though: Just like Apache conf files, the MetaBase is pretty crucial to the functioning of your Web server, so don't ruin it. Back it up first.

Tip 8: Add spell checking to your URLs

    Apache folks always brag about cool little tricks that Apache is capable of -- especially because of the wealth of modules that can extend the server's basic functionality. One of the coolest of these is the ability to fix URL typos using a module called mod_speling. Well, thanks to the folks at Port80 Software, it now appears that IIS admins can do this trick too, using an ISAPI filter called URLSpellCheck. You can check it out right on their site, by trying URLs like www.urlspellcheck.com/fak.htm, www.urlspellcheck.com/faq1.htm -- or any other simple typo you care to make.

Tip 7: Rewrite your URLs

    Cleaning your URLs has all sorts of benefits -- it can improve the security of your site, ease migration woes, and provide an extra layer of abstraction to your Web applications. Moving from a ColdFusion to an ASP based site, for example, is no big deal if you can remap the URLs. Apache users have long bragged about the huge power of mod_rewrite -- the standard Apache module for URL rewriting. Well, there are now literally a dozen versions of this type of product for IIS -- many of them quite a bit easier to use than mod_rewrite, which tends to presume familiarity with regular expression arcana. Check out, for example, IIS ReWrite or ISAPI ReWrite. So brag no more, Apache partisans.