Ehsan Mahpour’s Weblog

I was looking for a simple solution to synchronize the IIS settings across a webfarm that I found an interesting post on Scott’s webblog.

Included Files

With the theory behind us, let’s take a look at the files included in the download file. Note that I did not try to pretty it up or put a lot of error checking in it. It’s simple and easy to understand, but that also means that you may need to do some digging into the files to make any changes or to troubleshoot any issues that I didn’t handle in a friendly way.

[The first two files are the ones that you will use to do a Metabase Merge or Push.]

MetabasePush.bat

Usage: MetabasePush {ServerIP} [SMTP FQDN]

You can call this from a batch file that can live somewhere else, like on the desktop of your primary web server. It will do a metabase push from the current server (localhost) to the target server specified by the ServerIP.

You can optionally add the SMTP FQDN and it will update that on the target server. We use that at ORCS Web because each server node has a different SMTP FQDN.

MetabaseMerge.bat

Usage: MetabaseMerge {ServerIP} [SMTP FQDN]

This operates the same as MetabasePush except that it does a Merge instead. The ServerIP is required and the SMTP FQDN is optional. Don’t forget the differences mentioned above between a Push and Merge. This file calls RemoveAdminACLLine.vbs so that the target server retains its own security settings.

[The following files are helper files and don’t need to be run directly.]

IIsCnfg2.vbs

This is a copy (confirmed up to date May 2006) of IIsCnfg.vbs but with two minor modifications to make the target username and password optional.

Metaacl.vbs

This is an untouched Microsoft script to view and update the metabase ACLs permissions.

RemoveAdminACLline.vbs

This is used by MetabaseMerge.bat to remove the ACL lines so that the permissions on the target server are left untouched during a Merge.

ChangeSMTP-FQDN.vbs

This will change the fully qualified domain name of the SMTP server on the target server that you specify. It is used when there are different SMTP DNS names on each server.

Scott Forsyth’s IIS Clustering Utilities