IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Raymon — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 02:10:04 GMT

Very Helpfull! Please keep sharing

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Marnix Wolf — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 17:49:28 GMT

Great article!

We had similar problems (IIS Admin Service not starting after a reboot) and tried to solve it with restoring the IIS Metabase. Didn't help.

But when reading your article about the machinekey, something came to my mind.

A couple of days ago we overwrote the original All Users profile since the Citrix users needed a different 'default' setting for their countrysettings.

With this, the original machinekey which IIS Admin Service uses, disappeared as well.

But before we overwrote the original All User Profile folder, we made a backup. From backup we restored the original machinekey for IIS Admin Service.

And voila, everything runs like clockwork again!

Thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge!

Kind regards,
M.S. Wolf
System Administrator (and learning a lot from mishaps like mentioned above...)

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

G Hill — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 11:56:30 GMT

Bonza advice - and much beeter than the MS technet info.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

wxstorm — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:22:27 GMT

good
It solves my problem
Thank you!!!!!!

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Wole Banjoko — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 01:52:33 GMT

Awesome!! This solved an issue we experienced in our CITRIX environment. We went back to tape to get the machine file.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Muhammad Nadeem — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 04:37:49 GMT

Great Artical !

But In my case we end up in re-installing the IIS because unfortunatelt for in our Backup configuration "C:\Documents and Settings\" was under exception list and never get backed up.

Lesson learned:
If you have IIS Installed, make sure your Tape backup application includes "C:\Documents and Settings\" or Atleast "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys"

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

msadmin — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 23:00:30 GMT

I ran into the same problem on Win2k3 R2 x64. I didn't try to use it after setting up the machine but based on the logs it wasn't working initially. This server was created from an image (the image is created by another team).

I don't have the \windows\profile directory mentioned and the reg entry points to the All Users folder as it should, so at this point I'm going to uninstall/reinstall and see if that works. Based on the article I don't see any other option.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Phil Chapman — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:02:03 GMT

Great article! Some very useful info..Thanks

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

George — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 10:05:50 GMT

Thank you! This blog just saved my life!! Thank you for these insights.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

billys — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:21:12 GMT

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re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Lisa — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:39:25 GMT

I don't have a \windows\profile dir. I tried to reinstall and still no go. Any suggestions?

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Kevin — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 05:54:53 GMT

Hi all , very nice site! Thank You !

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

PaolaR — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:27:33 GMT

Thanks a lot, a great article!!!!!

I can resolve the problem.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

A very happy admin ;p — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:03:12 GMT

JEPP very fine stuff

and thanks a lot :)

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

A very, very happy one — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:39:41 GMT

Yep man, that worked. *uh* Hours of search ... Exchange did not start, even the IISADMIN. They KEYS were the Key.

Thanks god I had Backup. System is back up and running.

An interesting question after that: what if the keyfiles were destroyd? (*look left, look right, run*)

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

The good german — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:50:53 GMT

Thank you for this article. This saved me from reinstalling my server.

And always remember: It is a rather bad idea to move the "All Users" profile folder to another drive without moving the files (like the RSA keys) as well.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Net Admin — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:18:34 GMT

This article is a life saver. Keep up the good work. I initially thought I had to reinstall IIS but after reading this post and following it to the T I did not have to re-install IIS. Thanks a million.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Daniel Bragg — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 22:22:02 GMT

(sigh) No, uninstalling GoToMeeting wasn't the solution, and following the advice in this column wasn't either. My machine wasn't updated from an earlier version (fresh into XP Pro), and "Common AppData" is pointing to the correct folder in the appropriate %ALLUSERSPROFILE% directory.

Although I do have a C:\WINDOWS\Profiles\All Users directory, all that is in it is an empty C:\WINDOWS\Profiles\All Users\Adobe\Webbuy folder (maybe a clue to something, but I'm not seeing the connection). I also have only one "c2319" machine key file on my computer (in the correct directory).

I am very glad this information has helped a lot of people. I, for one, will have to look further.

Thank you for your efforts.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Kane Martin — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 23:09:28 GMT

Okay... First thank you for the posting as it put me on the right path and saved me a lot of time. I had a similar issue with the IISAdmin Service not starting. I noticed that I had two c2319 keys in my folder. The dates were so that one was before our issue and one was after. I renamed the new (not working) key and tried to start the service. It didn’t work and when it created the new key, it came back as the wrong one (although the same wrong one as before. The keys are set in two groups of numbers with an “_” separating them. The first set is not important here, but the second set of numbers (after the _) is the key represented in the registry as MachineGuid and can be found at HKLM\software\Microsoft\Cryptography. I changed that to match the old key and everything started working as normal. Still testing to see what the fix might have broken, but so far so good.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Jose Miguel — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:58:04 GMT

Thank you, Kane.

Your last post is the one it help us.

Great article!

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re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Joe — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:41:17 GMT

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re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Ken — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:15:34 GMT

Thanks for the tip!

Not sure why but on mine copying the c2319.. file from C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\HTML Help\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys allowd IIS admin to start.

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re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Rusty — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:44:58 GMT

My research of why IIS 6 could not start brought me to this thread, but restoring keys did not work for me. My problem turned out to be a corrupt metabase. Restoring MetaBase.xml fixed my issue. To restore MetaBase.xml, restore system state from your backup to a temp folder. Now copy the restored MetaBase.xml from your temp folder to %Systemroot%\System32\inetsrv\

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Lutz — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:59:43 GMT

I have had an older (manual)backup of the IIS-Metabase-configurationfiles in %windir%\system32\inetsrv\metaback

If I tried to make a resore (after reinstalled IIS) it didn't work. (signature-failure / "Falsche Signatur"), Now we know, it's because of the new machinekey-file.

My Solution was :

net stop iisadmin /y

net stop W3Svc /y

transfer the following XML-Tags form backuck.MDO into ..\inetsrv\metabase.xml :

- WebSvcExtRestrictionList=...

- all <IIsWebServer .. (webpages) entries

until tag <IIsApplicationPools

AND NOW :

change all entries UNCPassword="... and AdminACL=".. into the same entry as AdminACL=", which you will find at the top of file in tag <IIS_ROOT.

So you use the NEW metabase.xml, have the old entries for applications and websites in it, but simply changed their key-entries into the new key.

After finishing save metabase.xml and start iis :

net start iisadmin

net start W3Svc

For me, this was the solution for having NO Back-MachineKeyfile c2319, but had a back-config-file.

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

GDPfluger — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:46:05 GMT

I am encountering this error on Windows XP SP3 after sysprep with IIS 5.1 WWW and FTP installed. I am using the SP3 version of sysprep, so I don;t have any incompatibility there. Any idea how to prevent this from happening during/after sysprep?

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Dmitry — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:20:52 GMT

Kane Martin? you are the BEST!

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Justme — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:24:25 GMT

Your solution worked! Thanks so much for the explanation and saving me all the troubleshooting and headaches just to figure this one out!

Thanks again for sharing!

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

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re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Carla — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:01:06 GMT

Thank You !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

re: IIS6: "Supposed" Metabase Corruption

Jeff M — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:48:56 GMT

Thanks for this article, and a big thanks to Kane Martin. Had the same problem in my environment. For some reason, mid-week, the 'c2319' MachineKey file was replaced by a new one with a different MachineGuid. Swapped them around and IIS (and most importantly, SMTP) started right back up. Thanks again!