Another IIS Blog

This blog post is about working in a big company where the left hand often times doesn't know what the right hand does.

Are you using IIS Application Pools to host your customer's web sites? The more sites you host on a single machine the more likely it is one of these sites misbehaves and monopolizes system resources like the CPU. It's so easy for a programmer to do - forget to call the MoveNext() function in a database script and you spin the CPU at 100% until the underlying script engine times out.

We recently published an article on how to enable failover clustering for IIS7 and Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS). MSCS provides failover and increased availability of applications by failing over to a second machine that is on stand-by or by just taking the sick machine out of the network so that no requests are routed to it anymore.

We ran into some problems with Kerberos authentication lately and this forced me to unearth the knowledge I once had about Kerberos.

IIS is a demand-driven web server, i.e. IIS does things only when asked for. For example: an IIS worker process spawns up only when requests arrive for the sites that are hosted in this worker process. Without requests there isn't a worker process. This is great from a resource consumption point of view. Worker processes which don't run do not consume resources, memory in particular.

IIS 7.5 on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is changing the default Application Pool identity from NetworkService to virtual accounts with the name of the Application Pool itself. The Application Pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ will run as the virtual account with the name ‘DefaultAppPool’. Given this change I thought it might be useful to have a little script that lists all Application Pools and the accounts they are running as. Just copy the following script and save it as myAppPools.js.

We just made the Release Candidate of the IIS PowerShell Snap-in available. A lot of work was done between Tech Preview 2 and now. We focused mainly on augmenting the PowerShell Provider with almost 70 task-oriented cmdlets useful for day-to-day administrative tasks. Here is a quick categorization of the task-oriented cmdlets:

Tech Preview 2 of the IIS7 PowerShell Provider is now available for download.