Security Considerations for Out-of-Process Applications

By default, out-of-process applications and components, including ISAPI extensions, are not able to access metabase properties. This restriction is primarily for security reasons, to prevent unauthorized changes to the metabase. If you want to allow out-of-process applications to access the metabase, you must do one of the following:

• Give the IWAM_machinename account access to the metabase (this is probably a bad idea, from a system security standpoint).
• Change the identity of the out-of-process COM application from the interactive user (IUSR_machinename, by default) to a specific user account, and give that account access to the metabase (this is also somewhat risky, but the risk is limited to a single application).

For more information on changing application identity, see the Component Services documentation in the Platform SDK.