IIS 6 Basics| Windows IIS 6 Tutorials
What’s IIS
- Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly called Internet Information Server) is a set of Internet-based services for servers using Microsoft Windows.
- It is the world’s second most popular web server in terms of overall websites, behind Apache HTTP Server.
- As of June 2008 it served 35.39% of all websites according to Netcraft.[1] The servers currently include FTP, SMTP, NNTP, and HTTP/HTTPS.
Product History:
- 1996 – V1 ships with WindowsNT 4.0
—> V2 & V3 releases came in follow-up SP releases
- 1997 – V4 part of NT 4 Option Pack
- 2000 – V5 installed by default in Windows 2000
- 2003 – V6 released in Windows Server 2003
- 2008 – V7 released in “Longhorn” Server
IIS 6.0 Architecture Overview:
- IIS 6.0 is designed into two new components, the kernel mode HTTP protocol stack (HTTP.sys) and a user-mode administration and monitoring component.
- HTTP.sys is a kernel mode protocol stack that queues and parses incoming HTTP requests and caches and returns application content. This component does not load any application code, making it more secure. HTTP.sys listens for requests and queues them as needed.
- WWW Service Administration and Monitoring is a user mode process and configuration manager that delegates server operations and monitors the execution of application code. Like HTTP.sys this component does not load or process any application code.
Features-Increased Web server reliability and availability
- IIS 6.0 features a new, fault-tolerant architecture with health monitoring and process recycling that significantly increases the reliability of your Web server infrastructure. IIS 6.0 ensures that one application’s problems don’t cause another application, or the server itself, to fail. These features increase the availability of your Web sites and applications and can reduce the time administrators spend managing these applications
Easier server management
- IIS 6.0 features many new management tools designed to reduce the amount of time it takes to manage your Web server infrastructure. These features include a plain text XML configuration file that can be modified without having to stop the server, and command-line scripting. With these features, IIS 6.0 can increase the number of servers that a single administrator can manage.
Server consolidation
- IIS 6.0 is a highly-scalable Web server that provides new opportunities for Web server consolidation. By combining a reliable architecture with kernel-mode cache performance, IIS 6.0 enables more applications to be hosted on a single server. Server consolidation can reduce staffing costs, hardware costs, and site management costs.
Faster application development
- Faster application development With Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0, application developers benefit from a single, integrated application hosting environment. Building on IIS 6.0, the .NET Framework, and ASP.NET, Windows Server 2003 offers developers a broad choice of languages for rapid application development and fast, reliable hosting performance. IIS 6.0 also offers international support and support for the latest Web standards.
Increased Security:
Locked-down server
IIS 6.0 provides significantly improved security. To reduce the attack surface of systems, IIS 6.0 is not installed by default on Windows Server 2003—administrators must explicitly select and install it. IIS 6.0 ships in a locked-down state, serving only static content. Using the Web service extension node, Web site administrators can enable or disable IIS functionality based on the individual needs of the organization.
Web service extensions list
The default installation of IIS will not compile, execute, nor serve files with dynamic extensions. In order to have them served, each acceptable file extension must be added to the Web service extensions list. This requirement prevents anyone from calling a page with a dynamic extension that has not been secured.
Default low-privilege account
All IIS 6.0 worker processes—by default—run as Network Service user accounts, a new, built-in account type with limited operating system privileges, on Windows Server 2003. All ASP built-in functions always run as low-privileged accounts (anonymous user).
IIS 6.0 Improvements:
- Security overhaul
- XML-based metabase
- Support for the Microsoft .NET Framework
- Web-based administration
- Support for Web gardens
- Application isolation
- New response cache architecture
- Performance
IIS Services:
- World Wide Web (WWW) publishing service
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service
- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service
- Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) service
IIS Isolation Modes:
- IIS 6.0 runs in one of two modes of operational isolation
—> Worker process isolation mode
—> IIS 5.0 isolation mode (sometimes called “compatibility mode”)
- Fresh installs default to worker process isolation mode
- Upgrades from IIS 5 or earlier default to IIS 5.0 isolation mode
- Cannot run both modes on one server – must be one or the other
Finally:
- Clearly, the platform of choice for the foreseeable future is the Internet. With so many users on the Internet every day, and with so many new applications on the way, the world’s Web servers will certainly experience an increase in demand. IIS 6.0 has been designed to meet this demand. Its far-reaching improvements enhance performance, reliability, and scalability, and secure a spot for IIS 6.0 and the .NET platform as computing platforms for the millennium
IIS 7.0-Successor of IIS 6.0:
- Windows Server 2008 featuring Internet Information Services 7.0 is a powerful Web application and services platform that delivers rich Web-based experiences. It offers improved administration and diagnostic tools to help achieve lower infrastructure costs on a variety of popular development platforms. With improved reliability and scalability, IT professionals and developers can manage the most demanding Web serving environments, from a single Web server to a large Web farm.