Migrating a Web Server to IIS 5.0

Administration Interface

IIS 5.0 properties, which correspond with Apache directives, are contained in the metabase. The most significant difference you’ll find between administering Apache and IIS 5.0 is the fact that IIS 5.0 provides graphical tools, the IIS snap-in and the Internet Services Manager (HTML), for configuring the metabase, whereas Apache provides plaintext configuration files, usually httpd.conf, srm.conf, and access.conf, in which you configure directives.

Apache administrators who prefer to work from the command line and to script routine tasks will be happy to know that IIS 5.0 also provides a set of tools for programmatic administration. These tools are described in the “Administering IIS Programmatically” topic in the IIS 5.0 online product documentation. For more information about using the tools, see Administering an ISP Installation in this book.

Apache administrators will also find that Windows 2000 Server commands are similar to familiar UNIX commands. Additional utilities for command-line administration are included with the Windows NT Services for UNIX, a suite of interoperability tools and utilities provided by Microsoft for Windows NT Server and UNIX. At the time of this writing, a version of these tools is under development for Windows 2000.