IIS Manager

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

IIS Manager is a graphical interface for configuring your application pools or your Web, FTP, SMTP, or NNTP sites. With IIS Manager, you can configure IIS security, performance, and reliability features. You can add or delete sites; start, stop, and pause sites; back up and restore server configurations; and create virtual directories for better content management, to name only a few of the administrative capabilities. In previous releases of IIS, this tool was called the Internet Service Manager.

Important

To help minimize the attack surface of the server, IIS 6.0 is not installed on Windows Server 2003 by default. When you first install IIS 6.0, it is locked down — which means that only request handling for static Web pages is enabled, and only the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service) is installed. None of the features that sit on top of IIS are turned on, including ASP, ASP.NET, CGI scripting, FrontPage® 2002 Server Extensions from Microsoft, and WebDAV publishing. If you do not enable these features, IIS returns a 404 error. You can enable these features through the Web Service Extensions node in IIS Manager. For more information about how to troubleshoot 404 errors and other issues, see Troubleshooting in IIS 6.0.

Procedures

To start IIS Manager

  • From the Start menu, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

To start IIS Manager from the Run dialog box

  1. From the Start menu, click Run.

  2. In the Open box, type inetmgr, and click OK.

You can also access IIS from the Computer Management window. Accessing IIS in this way does not give you the range of administration options offered by IIS Manager; however, it does offer quick access and limited management options for your Web sites.

To start IIS Manager from the Computer Management window

  1. From the Start menu, right-click My Computer, and click Manage.

  2. In the console tree, expand the Services and Applications node.

  3. Click Internet Information Services. The names and states of your Web sites appear in the details pane.

  4. In the console tree, expand the Internet Information Services node and any subsequent Web site nodes to see a list of directories and virtual directories for that Web site.