Enabling Web Service Extensions

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

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.

Important

You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to perform the following procedure or procedures. As a security best practice, log on to your computer by using an account that is not in the Administrators group, and then use the runas command to run IIS Manager as an administrator. At a command prompt, type runas /user:Administrative_AccountName "mmc %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\iis.msc".

To enable Web service extensions

  1. In IIS Manager, click the Web Service Extensions folder.

  2. In the details pane, select the Web service extension that you want to enable, and then click Allow.

  3. To see the properties of a Web service extension, select an extension, and then click Properties.

    Important

    If you choose to allow all unknown ISAPI extensions or CGI extensions to run on your Web server, your Web server could be susceptible to computer viruses or worms that exploit these technologies. Instead, select only those specific ISAPI extensions or CGI extensions that you want to run on your Web server.