Windows Server Hacks

Chapter 6. IIS

Hacks #54-61

Internet Information Services (IIS) is one of the more popular features of Windows server platforms. Whether you’re running IIS 5 (Windows 2000 Server) or IIS 6 (Windows Server 2003), the ability to hack the metabase (the place where IIS stores its configuration settings) lets you do things that are impossible to do using the standard GUI tool for managing IIS—namely, Internet Services Manager.

Before you start hacking the metabase, however, you’d better be sure you’ve backed it up properly and know your way around inside it. Several hacks in this chapter deal with these topics, including how to restore the metabase when you have no working backup. Also included are tips on how to hide the metabase from attackers to make it more secure, how to use scripts to manage different aspects of IIS, and how to allow other HTTP services, such as the Apache web server, to run on Windows and coexist with IIS.

Back Up the Metabase

There’s more than one reason for backing up the metabase, and there are different ways of doing it too.

Instead of storing its configuration settings in the Windows Registry, like most other services store their configuration settings, IIS stores most of its settings in a file called the metabase. On Windows 2000 (IIS 5), the metabase is a binary file named MetaBase.bin, found in the %SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv folder. Windows Server 2003 (IIS 6) uses XML as the format for its configuration information, rather than the proprietary binary ...