IIS 7.0 Learns a Few Tricks from Apache 395
An anonymous reader writes "According to BetaNews, Microsoft is learning a few tricks from Apache for the next release of IIS, version 7.0. Specifically, the IIS feature set has been broken down into modules to reduce overhead. Modules can be changed on the fly, without restarting the Web server. Also, the IIS metabase has been completely dropped in favor of easily editable XML configuration files. Each Web application can have its own config file that overrides the system-wide configuration."
Erm (Score:5, Informative)
Saw a demo of it a few weeks ago.. (Score:5, Informative)
IIS6 (win 2003) has already done away with the metabase and gone to an XML file for all of the configuration settings.
IIS7 goes one further, by allowing you to put configuration files in each virtual directory or website to over-ride the parent setting (if permitted) - this allows a website owner to configure their own website, without affecting the other websites on the box, or having to ask the administrator to make the changes for them.
The MS guy told me they are trying to make management as easy as possible for servers containing thousands of seperate sites. He also said they hope to release IIS7 for Win2003 R2.
Loads of other management things are coming in too, such as the ability to examine currently execting requests, and kill them without restarting the site or server (VERY usefull if a script is looping)
MS's new approach to security seems to be really paying off - IIS6 was re-written from the ground up, and how many security holes have there been? I can't remember any.
Re:Not XML (Score:4, Informative)
suPHP will take care of that for you. Well, the user bit, not the thread safety bit.
http://www.suphp.org/Home.html [suphp.org]
No Reboot Required (Score:1, Informative)
I doubt running multiple versions on the machine will ever happen, which is fine.
Want IIS5 and it's lack of features? Run 2000, which is lacking compared to IIS6/2003.
Re:so... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:XML Config (Score:3, Informative)
mv
Heh, fat chance with that guy. I usually append a bind type serial number (2005091501) to the end of a copy. If you just use
httpd.orig.bak3 or
httpd.conf.this.one.works2.bak
in the conf directory.
Apache doesn't have hot-swappable modules (Score:2, Informative)
It has modules, but they are loaded when the server starts. If you want to enable or disable modules you need to restart the server.
You can restart the server in a fairly graceful way with very short downtime. But this is not the same as hot-swapable modules.
So, no, I doubt that anyone at Apache has patented hot-swappable modules.
Have a look at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/stopping.html [apache.org] for more details.
Re:How about multiple versions? (Score:3, Informative)
I won't completely flame you for sounding like a Windows-ignorant Linux zealot, because you're a fellow climber.
* Although why the hell would you want to?
Re:Not XML (Score:3, Informative)
Re:IIS 7 (Score:3, Informative)
Not that it fully answers your needs, but surely someone who manages 1000s of sites would be aware of its existence?
Re:How about multiple versions? (Score:3, Informative)
You can very easily run each version of your web app in different virutal sites in the same apache instance. You're going to have be convince me as to why it's necessary to run them under different instances.
Unlike Apache, IIS is far more configurable about it's "Application Pools" and can run them all as different uesrs, or different configurations or different security.
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
The IIS metabase is already an XML configuration file. It has been since IIS 6.0 which ships with Windows Server 2003. It sounds like they are just making some changes to it. Located at systemroot\System32\Inetsrv\Metabase.xml They also provide a schema file for it: MBSchema.xml
See this [microsoft.com] article for technical details.
Re:How about multiple versions? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Saw a demo of it a few weeks ago.. (Score:3, Informative)
Ah - you mean .htaccess
Now that's what I call innovation :-)
Re:Backward (Score:3, Informative)
Re:XML Config (Score:3, Informative)
I worked for a small ISP, and we used a heavily-commented named.conf and associated zone files to keep track of configuration information, explanations for non-obvious things, etc. Since we were a small shop and worked well together, this was fine. Until we merged with another ISP. Whose admins "helpfully" slaved their BIND to ours, made it the master, and then slaved ours to theirs. Without changing the zone filenames in named.conf. I think that, had I been in the same room with them before we managed to retrieve our off-site backups, I might've had to have killed them.
One hugely useful system is to use version control [honeypot.net] on your configuration directories. Let the new guy delete at will; you can always roll back his commits and explain why you're going to beat him if he does it again.
Re:About time (Score:1, Informative)
And if you don't want to think/read/peek at source/compile anything or the like, then there's always ISAPI_rewrite (the lite version is free and is enough for most tasks, and the full is reasonably priced). There is also OpURL and others.
If you were following with the IIS stuff better, you'd see it actually ISN'T really missing anything important, and IIS 7 is just going to rock.
Of course this'll get modded -1 Shill...
Re:Backward (Score:3, Informative)
And thank the gods for that! I believe the feature they are referring to is the concept of having configuration files at all (which you can then easily scriptify, version, etc). As far as I understand IIS was strictly pointy-clicky for config.
That MS chose to do their in XML isn't a feature, just an annoyance for whoever has to work with those files.
(Same thing with modules: having modules is the new feature, that they are run-time loaded is a pretty useless addition)
Re:My two cents... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:About time (Score:2, Informative)