Vista/Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) RC

In March, Vista/Windows Server 2008 SP2 RC was made public.  (See my blog post on SP2 Beta release here). 

From the IIS perspective, since the SP2 Beta release, we have been focusing on stability and reliability.  So there aren't any significant functional changes that we introduced in RC.  One exception is:

  • Specify root of a drive as the documents root.
    • The root of a drive (ie. d:\) can be used as the documents root.

We have had customer requests around this and we decided to enabled that in RC.  (For other IIS changes in SP2, refer to the Beta blog post).

There is one behavior that I would like to note.  In SP2 Beta as well as in RC, the IIS team has introduced a new identity called ApplicationPoolIdentity which can be used to run application pools.  In order to keep the functional behavior the same, if you create a new site using the inetmgr, the corresponding application pool will have NETWORK SERVICE as the identity.  However, you can change the process model from NETWORK SERVICE to ApplicationPoolIdentity after the application pool has been created.

Now, for some reason, let's suppose that you have decided to un-install SP2.  The un-installation will complete successfully, but you may find that your IIS instance is failing to start.  This may happen if you had configured any of the application pools to use ApplicationPoolIdentity.  Now that SP2 is removed, there is no such identity after SP2 is un-installed.

To work around this, simply locate the following from applicationHost.config and change the process identity model to a valid one, such as NETWORK SERVICE.

Change from:

<processModel identityType="ApplicationPoolIdentity" />

To (example: NETWORK SERVICE):

 <processModel identityType="NetworkService" />

 

The official SP2 RC site is here and you can download RC from:

  • ISO for Windows Server 2008 x86/x64/ia64 and Windows Vista x86/x64
  • x86 for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista x86
  • x64  for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista x64
  • IA64 for Windows Server 2008 ia64

 

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