Platform Improvements | Introducing Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003

In addition to the features just described, IIS 6.0 has made a number of improvements to the platform overall. These features make IIS a more compelling Web application platform.

64-Bit Support

The complete Windows Server 2003 family code base is compiled for 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Customers who demand highly scalable applications can take advantage of an operating system that runs and is supported on these two platforms.

IPv6.0 Support

Internet Protocol version 6.0 (IPv6.0) is the next -generation IP protocol for the Internet. The Windows Server 2003 family now implements a production-ready IPv6.0 stack. On servers where the IPv6.0 protocol stack is installed, IIS 6.0 will automatically support handling HTTP requests that arrive over IPv6.0.

Granular Compression

On a congested network, it's useful to compress responses. In IIS 5.0, compression was an ISAPI filter and could be enabled only for the entire server. IIS 6.0 allows a much more granular (file-level) configuration.

Quality of Service

Quality of service (QoS) ensures that particular components of the Web server, or specific content served by that server, don't take over all server resources, such as memory and CPU cycles. It allows the administrator to control the resources being used by particular sites, application pools, the WWW service as a whole, and others. QoS also ensures a certain quality of service that other services, sites, and applications on the system receive. It does this by limiting the resources consumed by particular Web sites and applications or by the WWW service itself. In IIS 6.0, QoS takes the form of the following features:

Connection limits
Connection timeouts
Application pool queue length limits
Bandwidth throttling
Process accounting
Memory-based recycling

Logging Improvements

Logging improvements in IIS 6.0 include the following:

UTF-8 logging support.

With additional Unicode and UTF-8 support, IIS 6.0 now supports writing log files in UTF-8 instead of just ASCII (or the local code page).
Binary logging.

Binary logging allows multiple sites to write to a single log file in a binary, nonformatted manner. This new logging format will offer improved performance over current text-based ”World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), IIS, and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) ”logging formats because the data doesn't have to be formatted in any specific manner.

Additionally, binary logging offers scalability benefits as a result of the dramatic reduction in the number of log file buffers needed to maintain logs for tens of thousands of sites. Tools can then be used to postprocess the log file to extract the log entries. Even homegrown tools can be written to process binary log files because the format of the log entries and file will be published.

IIS 6.0 also supports the ability to log HTTP substatus codes in W3C and binary logging formats. Substatus codes are often helpful in debugging or troubleshooting because IIS returns specific substatus codes for specific types of problems. For example, if a request cannot be served because the application needed has not been unlocked (for example, ASP by default on clean installations), the client will get a generic 404 error code. IIS actually generates a 404.2, which will now be logged to W3C and binary log files.

File Transfer Protocol

Traditionally, ISP/ASP customers have used File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to upload their Web content because of its easy availability and wide adoption. IIS 6.0 allows the isolation of users into their own directories, thus preventing users from viewing or overwriting other users' Web content. The user's top-level directory appears as the root of the FTP service, thus restricting access by disallowing further navigation up the directory tree. Within the user's specific site, the user has the ability to create, modify, or delete files and folders. The FTP implementation is architected across an arbitrary number of front-end and back-end servers, which increases reliability and availability. FTP can be easily scaled based on the addition of virtual directories and servers without affecting the end users.

PASV FTP requires the server to open a data port for the client to make a second connection. This connection is separate from the typical port 21 that's used for the FTP control channel. The port range used for PASV connections is now configurable with IIS 6.0. This feature can reduce the attack surface of IIS 6.0 FTP servers by allowing administrators to have more granular control over the port ranges that are exposed over the Internet.

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