IIS / Community Updates

Been busy recently, my second book due early next month + my master thesis due in Dec. Hardly, have time to relax and my wife started complaining on and off. Well, that's life I guessed.

Now, as you may heard MOM 2005 just been RTM on the 25th Aug. This is a great tool for managing large-scale and complex IT infrastructure. I don't have the opportunity to use it as my client based machines are scatter around and hosted by different ISPs, with different firewall policies and etc. Anyway, if you are using MOM 2000, you should start planning upgrade to 2005, according to the operation team of microsoft.com, this is the only way to fly :) To prepare your IIS 6.0 for MOM2005, you need this management pack released yesterday.

Next, do you know that there is no more 'website operator' tab in IIS6.0?. Last I heard from few newsgroups postings by MS that it was due to 'no customer use it, so we drop it'. But then, some comments referred that it is related to 'security'. But anyhow, it's not there and gone in IIS 6.0. The KBs (326902, 267094)describing how to use MetaACL to control Metabase access, but then I haven't tested it and have yet to see anyone claimed that they have done it successfully. So to let a non-local admin user to manage IIS 6.0 is almost 'impossible'. There is however, internal MS documentation that allow such practice, it was tested by the customer, and it's working fine. Take note, as usual such 'workaround' ARE not supported by Microsoft. hence it will never make it as a KB. So how ?  there are third party control panel that you can download, some are free and of coz some need to pay. Jake (IIS MVP) has a pretty decent IIS Admin control panel, more than 5000 downloads within few months, And this one I just got it from MSDN feed, show case how to use ASP.NET 2.0 to manage your website operations.

Finally, two new microsoft related blogs:
- Community Kitchen (public/private NNTP newsgroups team blogs)
- MS.COM Operation Team (microsoft.com behind the stage team blogs)

That's it for now, I will be 'quiet' for sometime.

Cheers.