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The servers currently include FTP , SMTP , NNTP and HTTP / HTTPS . VERSIONS
HISTORY IIS started life as an additional set of Internet based services for Windows NT 3.51. IIS 2.0 followed adding support for the Windows NT 4.0 operating system and 3.0 introduced the Active Server Pages dynamic scripting environment. IIS 4.0 dropped the Gopher and was bundled with the operating system as a separate "Option Pack" CD-ROM. The current shipping version is IIS 6.0 for Windows Server 2003 and IIS 5.1 for Windows XP Professional - a restricted version that supports a limited number of connections and a single web site. For Windows Vista clients, the local IIS 7.0 web server will change not to limit on connections but will limit workloads based on the active concurrent requests improving usability and peer-to-peer scenarios. SECURITY Earlier versions of IIS were hit with a spate of vulnerabilities, chief among them CA-2001-19 which led to the infamous "", Microsoft goes a step further by modularizing many of the components, creating a stack from which you can pick and choose. In versions of IIS before 6.0, all the features were run on the System account, allowing exploits to run wild on the system. Under 6.0 all request handling processes have been brought under a Network Services account which has significantly fewer privileges. In particular this means that if there is an exploit in a feature or custom code, it wouldn't necessarily compromise the entire system given the sandboxed environment the worker processes run in. IIS 6.0 also contained a new kernel HTTP stack (http.sys) with a stricter HTTP request parser and response cache for both static and dynamic content. INTERNET INFORMATION SERVICES 7.0 Debuting with Windows Vista , and also to be included in Windows Server "Longhorn" , IIS 7.0 will feature a modular architecture. Instead of a monolithic server which features all services, IIS 7 will have a core web server engine. Modules offering specific functionality can be added to the engine to enable its features. The advantage of having this architecture is that only the features required can be enabled and that the functionalities can be extended by using custom modules. The following sets of modules are slated to ship with the server: # HTTP Modules # Security Modules # Content Modules # Compression Modules # Caching Modules # Logging and Diagnostics Modules Writing extensions to IIS 7 using ISAPI has been deprecated in favour of the module API. Much of IIS's own functionality is built on this API, and as such, developers will have much more control over a request process than was possible in prior versions. Modules can also be written using any .NET Framework language, and can be deployed on a per-site basis. A significant change from previous versions of IIS is that all web server configuration information is stored solely in XML configuration files, instead of in the metabase. The server has a global configuration file that provides defaults, and each virtual web's document root (and any subdirectory thereof) may contain a web.config containing settings that augment or override the defaults. Changes to these files take effect immediately. This marks a significant departure from previous versions whereby web interfaces, or machine administrator access, was required to change simple settings such as default document, active modules and security/authentication. It also eliminates the need to perform metabase synchronization between multiple servers in a farm of web servers. IIS 7 also features a completely rewritten administration interface that takes advantage of modern MMC features such as task panes and asynchronous operation. Configuration of ASP.NET is more fully integrated into the administrative interface. Other changes:
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