IIS Disaster Recovery

[diziet]

Hi All

Does anyone know a reliable way of restoring a complete IIS Configuration from backup. I've looked at the Microsoft site and keep coming across the disturbing news that you can't restore a configuration from IIS backups to a newly installed OS as the Metabase is machine specific. I am sure I'm missing something here.....


I haven;t had a disaster yet but I'm sure the day will come so I want to be sure I'm ready when it does!!


Thanks in advance

 

[LesleyW]

As we use a Web Farm, and are part of a big corporation where sites must be tested on many different servers before being deployed, we need a repeatable configuration within IIS (also using Site Server).

We script our installation using VBScript. All of the Site server and IIS stuff has a programmable interface, ditto MTS. It took a lot of work to get it up and working but worth it as we now have a set of base scripts which we understand enough to be able to use to set up any website in IIS/Site Server. This may be a better way forward than trying to backup the configuration.

 

[rewebb]

diziet is right - you cannot backup the IIS configuartion to a different server :-(

We use a lo-tech solution, which has a few other benefits though We document the configuration of our web servers. I know it means that errors can creep in when a new server is installed and I know it's now as fast as LesleyW's scripted version but it works

If I was to script something I be tempted to use perl - but then I'm old fashioned like that ;-)

 

[diziet]

Thanks for the replies. It appears you can use Metabase Editor or some such Application although its not a guaranteed method. Bit of a nightmare if you loose your entire server!

 

[rewebb]

The metabase editor enables you to *manually* make changes to the metabase - a bit of a nightmare really!!