Chapter 6: Administering Web Edition

In the previous chapter, we looked at the various tools and methods you can use to manage Standard and Enterprise Editions of Windows Server 2003. In this chapter I’ll focus on Web Edition, the edition specially designed for web application hosting on “blade” servers running in service provider data centers. A blade is a complete computer built on a card or module; and by housing multiple blades in a single rack-mountable chassis, service providers can save valuable rack space in their data centers. In particular, we’ll look at the Web Interface for Server Administration (WISA), an Active Server Pages application running on IIS 6 that allows administrators to remotely manage many aspects of their IIS machines remotely using Internet Explorer. You’ll also see how Telnet can be used to remotely administer IIS machines using a command-line interface, though I’ll defer a full discussion of command-line administration until Chapter 11, “Working from the Command Line.”

Administration Methods

You saw in Chapter 1 that Web Edition is in many ways a “light” version of Windows  Server 2003. For instance, although a Web Server machine can be part of a domain, you can’t install Active Directory on a machine running Web Edition, so a Web Server machine can’t assume the role of domain controller for your network. However, you can administer Active Directory from a Web Server machine by opening a blank MMC console and adding the appropriate snap-ins (if you’re missing any snap-ins, you can install the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack on the machine to install the necessary DLLs).

Tip 

While machines running Web Edition can belong to a domain, the usual configuration in an ISP or ASP web-hosting data center is to configure them as belonging to a workgroup and assign the local Administrator account to a user that owns each collocated server.

As far as IIS 6 administration is concerned, Web Edition supports all the methods available for Standard and Enterprise Edition, as described in the preceding chapter. In other words, you can administer a Web Server machine using the IIS Manager console by enabling the Remote Desktop feature and connecting to it using Remote Desktop Connection, by installing the Remote Desktop Web Connection component so you can manage it using Terminal Services over HTTP, and so on. The main differences between Web Edition and the other editions regarding IIS are as follows:

• IIS installs by default on Web Edition. On Standard and Enterprise Editions you have to manually add the Application Server role using the Manage Your Server Wizard. This wizard is not available (nor needed) on Web Edition because the only role it is intended for is hosting websites.

• Web Edition installs the Remote Administration (HTML) component of the World Wide Web service by default. This creates an Administration website for IIS that enables you to securely manage the server using Internet Explorer over an SSL connection. Toward the end of the preceding chapter, you learned that Remote Administration (HTML) could also be installed on the Standard and Enterprise editions—-but it isn’t installed by default on those editions as it is on Web Edition.

  Security Alert! 

  For Remote Administration (HTML) to function, Web Edition also installs the Active Server Pages (ASP) component of IIS by default. If you open IIS Manager on Web Server and select the Web Service Extensions node, you will see that ASP is enabled (in an Allowed state as opposed to a Prohibited state).

The rest of this chapter focuses on administering Web Edition using this Remote Administration (HTML) component. We will also look briefly at using Telnet to administer Web Server, as this is a commonly used tool for command-line administration of remote servers.