Ensuring That the WWW Service is Enabled After Upgrade

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

For security reasons, the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service) is disabled when you upgrade from Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2000 Advanced Server to Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, respectively. The WWW service is disabled on upgrade because IIS 5.0 was installed by default during the Windows 2000 Server installation, and, in many cases, the WWW service was not used. To decrease the attack surface of the server, IIS 6.0 is disabled by default when you upgrade from Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003 unless you do one of the following:

  • For manual or unattended upgrades, run the IIS Lockdown Tool on your Windows 2000 Server before starting the upgrade process.

  • For manual or unattended upgrades, add the registry entry RetainW3SVCStatus to the registry.

  • For unattended upgrades, add the entry "DisableWebServiceOnUpgrade = False" in the unattended install script.

  • Continue with the upgrade and enable the WWW service after upgrade. For more information about enabling the WWW service, see Preventing the WWW Service from Being Disabled later in this section.

Note

Because IIS 4.0 is not installed by default on computers running Windows NT Server 4.0, the Windows Server 2003 upgrade does not disable the WWW service when upgrading from IIS 4.0 to IIS 6.0.