IIS Admin Blog

I have recently started working on 64-bit Windows servers more often and thought I’d share some of my experiences along the way.

One of the issues I encountered was with the installation of PHP on a 64-bit Windows Server 2003 R2 machine. The server already had IIS 6.0 installed so I downloaded the latest distribution of PHP and installed it in the usual way as described here How To Install PHP on IIS 6.0

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In this tutorial we are going to look at how to create an FTP site which enforces ‘User Isolation’ in IIS 5.0

User Isolation is implemented as an option in the FTP service in IIS 6.0 when you create a new FTP site and it allows you to host multiple FTP sites on one server - it is particularly useful in an ISP shared server hosting situation as it prevents users from accessing or even viewing other users’ folders on the server. The FTP user’s top level folder appears as the root of the FTP site.

Implementing user isolation in IIS 5.0 is possible but it requires the server administrator to do some additional configuration in order to set it up it both successfully and securely.

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In this tutorial I am going to demonstrate how to secure a web site using a client certificate. I don’t intend to explain in detail what a client certificate is or how it works. If you don’t know then I suggest you read this Microsoft KB article before we get started :

IIS and client certificates

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=907274

In a nutshell a client certificate provides an extra layer of security for a web site - you can configure a web site so that any user wishing to connect is required to provide both a valid client certificate and a valid password. This is commonly known as ‘two factor authentication’ - the two factors are ’something that you know’ and ’something that you have’. In this scenario the ’something that you know’ is your password and the ’something that you have’ is your client certificate.

I am also going to expand on the final comments in the above KB article and demonstrate how to perform User mapping with a client certificate.

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System Requirements

For this installation I used the following :

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0

Sun Java Runtime JRE 5.0 Update 2

Apache Jakarta Tomcat version 5.5.9

The JK2 Tomcat Web Server Connectors

Note: Previous versions of Tomcat required the Java SDK to be installed. However, as of version 5.5 Tomcat only requires the Java runtime environment. In fact the release notes for Tomcat 5.5.9 say this,

“Tomcat 5.5 is designed to run on J2SE 5.0 and later, and requires configuration to run on J2SE 1.4. Make sure to read the “RUNNING.txt” file in this directory if you are using J2SE 1.4.

In addition, Tomcat 5.5 uses the Eclipse JDT Java compiler for compiling JSP pages. This means you no longer need to have the complete Java Development Kit (JDK) to run Tomcat, but a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is sufficient.” 

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One of the most common questions people seem to ask when attempting to run some form of CGI application or script (such as PHP or Perl) on an IIS 6.0 server is “How do I change the default CGI script timeout value ?“ Quite often this is because they are trying to execute a relatively long-running script in an application and they are seeing the following error message :

“The specified CGI application exceeded the allowed time for processing”

The default value for the CGI script timeout property in the IIS metabase is 300 seconds for both IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0 In this brief tutorial I will demonstrate the various ways in which you can modify this default value for IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0

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In the final article in this series I am going to demonstrate how to install and configure WordPress on an IIS 6.0 web server. WordPress is a free open source blogging platform which requires both PHP and MySQL and is renowned for its “Famous 5 Minute Installation”. However, it was because the installation was taking considerably longer than 5 minutes that I decided to start writing my own installation guide.

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In this walkthrough we are going to look at installing and configuring MySQL to work with PHP on an IIS 6.0 web server. If you have not already installed PHP you can do so by following the steps in this article here (http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/?p=4)

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I recently decided to experiment with hosting my own blog and after looking at the various packages available decided that I wanted to use WordPress. However, when it came to installing WordPress, I found that there was a lack of really good documentation available if you wanted to use IIS 6.0 as your web server. I also found quite a bit of contradictory information regarding the installation of PHP and MySQL on Windows 2003 - so I decided to write my own. This is the first of a series of articles which will provide a complete walkthrough enabling you to install PHP, MySQL and WordPress on an IIS 6.0 web server.

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I have decided to start this blog as a place to host the various IIS related articles that I previously had published over at the IIS Resources web site (www.iis-resources.com) which sadly now seems to have gone forever.