Managing IIS with scripts

Jul 23, 2004

InfrastructureWork

I needed to create a virtual directory in IIS 6 during the deployment of one of our backend application on a Windows 2003 server. This application is a COM component written in C++ that I developed wrapping a very old VB6 COM component. The whole exposed as a Web Service using the SOAP Toolkit 3. I already discussed about it here.

So I created a script that will register both COM component, by the way regsvr32 is really bad cause it doesn’t return different value if it fails. Right now I have no verification in the script that let me know if the registration went well. I plan to add it in a second step by reading the content of the registry using the reg command. The script is using the SOAPVDIR.CMD packaged with the SOAP Toolkit 3 to create the Virtual Directory with the soap ISAPI of the SOAP Toolkit 3:

“c:\Program Files\MSSOAP\Binaries\SOAPVDIR.CMD” CREATE $VDIR_NAME path

Then I needed to change the user name used for the anonymous access:

script c:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs SET /W3SVC/1/ROOT/$VDIR_NAME/AnonymousUserName myusername

and his password:

cscript c:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs SET /W3SVC/1/ROOT/$VDIR_NAME/AnonymousUserPass mypassword

At this point I am not that happy about this method cause I have to specify in clear text a password in a script. I have two options. Either the user has to pass the password when running the script, but as it is a script calling this new script and I don’t want to change it, I find that I could implement my own command using .NET and the namespace: System.DirectoryServices with such code:

using System;
using System.DirectoryServices;
using System.Reflection;

namespace ADSI1
{
  class ConfigIIS
  {
    [STAThread]
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      string serverName = "localhost";
      string password = "<administrative_password>";
      string serverID = "1234";

      CreateNewWebSite(serverName, password, serverID);
      CreateVDir(serverName, password, serverID);
    }

    static void CreateNewWebSite(string serverName, string password, string serverID)
    {
      DirectoryEntry w3svc = new DirectoryEntry ("IIS://" + serverName + "/w3svc",serverName + "\\administrator", password,AuthenticationTypes.Secure);
      DirectoryEntries sites = w3svc.Children;
      DirectoryEntry newSite = sites.Add(serverID,"IIsWebServer"); //create a new site
      newSite.CommitChanges();
    }

    static DirectoryEntry CreateVDir (string vdirname, string serverID)
    {
      DirectoryEntry newvdir;
      DirectoryEntry root=new DirectoryEntry("IIS://localhost/W3SVC/" + serverID + "/Root");
      newvdir=root.Children.Add(vdirname, "IIsWebVirtualDir");
      newvdir.Properties["Path"][0]= "c:\\inetpub\\wwwroot";
      newvdir.Properties["AccessScript"][0] = true;
      newvdir.CommitChanges();
      return newvdir;
    }
  }
}

And then I could save the encrypted password in the config file of the tool.

Update: I found some articles about the namespace System.DirectoryServices here: