IIS6.0 has a new architecture with a number of additions and changes that you may not be unaware of. The new architecural changes are mainly involving the WWW Service within IIS 6.0 and how the processing of HTTP requests takes. There are lots of things baked into the new stack that are more performant, secure and manageable, such as HTTP.SYS, a new process isolation model and application pooling/recycling.
Before going into the new architecture, I guess the first place to start is installation, as IIS 6.0 is not installed out of the box.
With this, you have to explictly install IIS 6.0. To do this you have to go to Start Menu-> Settings -> Control Panel and select add or remove programs.
When you select Application Server you only get a minimium set up features that only allows you to serve static HTML requests and manage a Web Site. So taking the screen above, you need to click on details and determine what services you need, the list includes:
- Application Server Console
- ASP.NET
- Enable Network COM+ Access
- Enable Network DTC Access
- IIS ---- with more configuration details
- MSMQ
and within the IIS configuration option you need to determine which of the following services you need:
- Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) Server Extensions ---- with more configuration details
- Common files
- File Transfer (FTP) Service
- Frontpage 2002 Server Extensions
- Internet Information Services Manager
- Internet Priniting
- NNTP Printing
- SMTP Service
- World Wide Web Service -- with more configuration details
and then you drill down to a point where you have determined what WWW services you would like to enable and the following are the options:
- Active Server Pages
- Internet Data Connector
- Remote Administration (HTML)
- Remote Desktop Web Connection
- Server Side Includes
- WebDAV Publishing
- World Wide Web Service
So this gets you to a point where IIS 6.0 is installed, but if you use the default options IIS will only server static content and you have the ability to manage web sites. So if you are planning to run ASP.NET on your web server, you are going to have to explicitly install it as part of the IIS 6.0 installation.
NOTE:
If you are going to be using COM+ or MSDTC you are all going to have to have to enable them for Network access, see the following KB articles for details
