MD_ETAG_CHANGENUMBER Metabase Property

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

IIS uses the value specified in the MD_ETAG_CHANGENUMBER property to generate a portion of the entity tags (ETags) that are sent to clients in server response headers. By setting a matching value for MD_ETAG_CHANGENUMBER on all the Web servers in a Network Load Balanced (NLB) cluster, the value of the entity tag (ETag) will become the same on all the servers, preventing clients from having to re-download content that already exists in the client cache when a conditional request is sent to a different Web server in the cluster.

The metabase represents unlimited as the DWORD value of 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF); however, VBScript represents unlimited in hexadecimal format as &HFFFFFFFF. Previous versions of IIS represented unlimited as -1.

Attribute Name Attribute Value

XML Data Type

DWORD

WMI Data Type

SINT32

ADSI Data Type

DWORD

ABO Data Type

DWORD

ABO Metabase Identifier

MD_ETAG_CHANGE_NUMBER

Attributes

INHERIT

Default Value

null

MetaFlagsEx

hidden

User Type

IIS_MD_UT_SERVER

ID

2039

Configurable Locations

You can configure this property at the following locations in the IIS metabase.

Metabase Path IIS Admin Object Type

/LM/W3SVC

IIsWebService

Code Example

For general code examples, see Code Examples to Configure Metabase Properties.