One of the new and long awaited features in IIS 7 is support for FTPS or FTP over SSL.  By default all FTP data is transfered in clear text, including the user name and password.  From a security point of view you can see this is a bad thing.  FTPS to the rescue!  Before you begin you will need to download and install FTP for ...

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) types are used to instruct a Web browser or mail application how to handle a file received from a server. For example, when your Web browser requested an item on this server, it also requested the MIME type of the object. Some MIME types, JPEG's for example, can be displayed inside the browser. Others, ...

Windows Server 2003 provides us several ways to manipulate IIS, the first being GUI based. This, while useful, becomes cumbersome if you are administering more than a few sites. The second option is to do things programmatically, either utilizing the build in scripts, or writing your own. TLA reader Gerald Bunch has written an excellent how to on ...

Using IIS, you can host multiple Web sites on a single server. There are a number of ways to distiguish between them but host headers allow you to host them on a single IP Address and Port. With IIS 6.0 you can also use host headers on SSL web pages as well. IIS allows you to assign multiple Web sites the same IP Address/Port and distinguish them ...

You can improve SSL performacne by enabling kernel-mode Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Kernel-mode SSL improves performance by allowing encryption and decryption to take place in the kernel where processing is done faster. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 allows you run SSL in kernel mode instead of the default, user mode. By running SSL in Kernel ...

If you have ever looked through your web server logs, or come across a 404 error on a website you are familiar with HTTP response codes. These codes tell you that a request has been processed, if it was successful, or if an error occured. These response codes can tell you a lot, and are very useful when it comes to troubleshooting, but what ...

Logging traffic to your websites can offer a slew of information that maybe useful to IT staff, management and marketing. By determinig which pages are most popular, where visitors are coming from, and what browser they are using is helpful information you can use to improve your website. IIS 6 supports four different logging formats: W3C ...

Password changes are an important first line of defense in protecting your network. Making this task easier for your users, will hopefully improve the chances that they actually do change it. Windows 2003 allows you to change passwords via a webpage on your intranet. To start we need to open up the IIS Manager MMC. Drill down to the Default ...

Internet Information Services (IIS) includes an FTP component which can be used to transfer files. If you have multiple FTP users and wish to isolate them from each other you can use FTP Isolation to accomplish this goal. This can be used if you are hosting multiple web sites and only want the FTP user to have access to their WWW root directory. ...

Using IIS, you can host multiple Web sites on a single server. There are a number of ways to distiguish between them but host headers allow you to host them on a single IP Address and Port. When hosting multiple websites on a single IIS server, you can configure each Web site to use a different static IP address. This can be expensive as public ...

Configuring a honeypot in IIS is a simple task that you can do to reduce attacks on your IIS webservers. Now this is not exactly a honeypot, a honeypot is a host with known vulnerabilities deliberately exposed to a public network, but more of a redirector of traffic. Using HTTP Host Headers, it is possible to divert hacker traffic to a ...

One of the bigger changes to IIS 6 is the conversion of the IIS Metabase from a binary (bin) file to an XML file. What this allows is the editing of the IIS Metabase while IIS is running, similar to httpd.conf in Apache. The metabase files for IIS 6 are located at %SystemRoot%\System32\Inetsrv and are named MetaBase.xml - which is the XML file ...

Bandwidth is finite, and saving it can save money as well as speed up access to web resources. One method to save on bandwidth is to use HTTP Compression. HTTP Compression is built into most web servers and browsers and can improve site performance by reducing the amount of time required to transfer data between the server and the client. To ...

When you connect to a mail server using telnet you will receive a message telling you some basic information about the mail server, including FQDN of the server, the protocol, server version and the date, time and time zone. The following is an example of such a banner. 220 Server.Domain.Com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.5.7226.0 ...

I'll be the first to admit I love using the GUI to admin my network, however there are times when command line tools will speed up the task at hand. Managing IIS 6.0 from the command line can cut down on the time you take to create or delete, start or stop web sites running on your IIS server(s). IIS.vbs is installed to %systemroot%\System32 when ...