If you have been following the IrS 7 se'ries that has been running for the past few months, you'd have seen
that there are tons of new configuration options in US7. All of these can be man¬aged through multiple ways-IrS Man¬ager, the AppCmd command line, PowerS hell scripts and more. This month we take a brief look at the new configura¬tion architecture and the different ways that an administrator can use them.

In IrS6, a new feature was: moving the metabase (the database that holds the configuration data of IrS) from a propri¬etary binary format to an XML based open format. This allowed admins to change settings by simply writing to a file called Metabase.xml. However, with the advent of . NET, especially ASP.NET, this brought on a new set of issues. ASP.NET has its own set of configuration files, namely machine.config and web.config. Working with different sets of XML files and their individual configurations sud¬denly started becoming a little bit compli¬cated.Enter IrS 7. In this version the IrS 7 configuration system has been made compatible with ASP.NET's configura¬tion system. This is how it works: ApplicationHost.config: This is the IrS 7 main configuration file that con¬tains all the settings for the server as well as for the sites on the server. It has the same syntax and schema as the ASP.NET configuration. Machine.config: This is the full con¬figuration file for .NET that stores all possible values of different configu¬ration directives on this machine.

Web.config: This is the site/applica¬tion specific configuration file that now stores data for both .NET as well as for IrS7.
Basically, Web.config works like this.
It has two sections that deal with two dif¬ferent sets of configuration data. The sys¬tem. web section stores the configuration that has anything to do with ASP.NET while the system. webServer section stores data for IrS 7-both specific to the site or application that the Web.config be¬longs to. Now that you have an understanding as to how IrS 7 stores its configuration data, we can take a look at the different ways an administrator can manage it.

The first way that an administrator can manage the US 7 server is remotely. In earlier versions of US6 you had a few choices-do a remote desktop, connect via the US MMC over a binary IP protocol or use the IrS Admin website. In US 7 the last two have been done away with. In¬stead an administrator can connect to a site or application remotely over a secure HTTPS connection using US Manager. That is, from a remote machine that To allow remote connections to IIS7, simply turn on this service and make the appropriate changes. Make sure to start the service once you are done has the new lIS Manager installed, you can connect to a running lIS? server over a secure HTTP connection. To do this, one must first install a Windows Server 2008 feature called lIS? Remote Management Service. Once this is installed, you will get a new icon within the Management Options group on the server.

Open this icon and turn the Remote Management option on. You can also change the other settings if you wish. You will need a digi¬tal certificate for the HTTPS connection to the service. lIS? au¬tomatically creates a new self-signed certificate for each server, however, if you wish you can also use any other certificate in¬stalled on the machine as well. Once the configurations are done, save the setup and start the service. You can now connect from any machine running lIS Manager by giving the name of the server, site or application. Connection options are Windows or lIS credentials. You can set the latter in the same Management section.

The next thing an administrator can do is to delegate the ad¬ministration of certain configuration options to others. For in¬stance, if you're an ISP running a server with hundreds or thousands of sites, managing each site yourself would be a pain. Instead, you can delegate certain options to owners of the sites themselves and they can go ahead and make whatever changes they want. For example, you might want owners to take care of simple options like Default Document, Logging and Compres¬sion, but not want them to change sensitive ones like SSL,Modules. etc. To do this. at the server level. select Feature Delegation. In this screen. you will get to see a list of all the features available on the server. You can select each feature and turn the feature delegation to one of the following three values: >- Not Delegated: The user cannot view or change this particular fea¬ture. The value for the feature is stored in the applicationHost.config file and only administrators can change it.

>- Read Only: The user can view but cannot change the value for this fea¬ture. The value is stored within the system.webServer section of the site's web.config file. Attempts to change the value will result in the site throwing an exception to anyone trying to reach it.

>- Read/Write: The feature is fully del¬egated and the user can change the value to any valid option. The setting is stored as in the 'Read Only' option but is writable.

Now when a user connects to his site with either Windows or US Manager cre¬dentials. depending upon the delegations configured on the server. he will be able to see only the last two types of features for his site and make changes only to the last type.

Finally. administrators can quickly scale out their Web server into multiple machines with minimal effort. In earler versions to ensure that servers run the same configuration. one had to setup complicated replication policies. In US 7. however. administrators can use what is known as Shared Configuration. To do this. simply select the icon from the management section on the server that has the configuration setup as you wish. Now in the context bar. click 'Export Configura¬tion .. .' In the dialog that pops up. you can select a path to store the configuration to. rr this is a UNC network share you can give the credentials to connect to it. You also need to give a strong password for encrypting the exported configuration.

Once the export is done. on all the servers that need to share the configuration-including the one that you just ex¬ported the configuration from- turn on the option that says 'Enable Shared Con¬figuration' and give it the path where the files were stored with the appropriate credentials. Now if you make configuration changes on any server. it will immedi¬ately apply on all other servers as well since the configuration files are actually being shared.

As you can see. US 7 has a number of new configuration options that administrators can use to make their life easier and make the management of servers. sites and applications much more effi¬cient and secure.