IIS Export Utility FAQ
 FAQ version 2.1

 

The latest version of this document can always be found at http://www.adsonline.co.uk/IISExport/documentation/FAQ.htm

FrontPage server extension considerations
The IIS Export utility can only transfer settings from IIS4/5, and therefore cannot transfer any transactions from Microsoft Transaction Server(MTS), or setup FrontPage Server Extensions as you previously had them. For this reason, if you used FrontPage Server Extensions you will have to re-load these onto your sites.

In the IMC your site will still display FrontPage Web with or without the tick as you had it previously. However, the FrontPage Server Extensions will not be added on. To do this, use the FrontPage Server Administrator, which is located in the same program group as IIS on your start menu. Follow the guides set down in the troubleshooting section of the IIS Export documentation.

IMPORTANT SECURITY NOTE
If you copied the files for your web sites using Windows Explorer, not all of the permissions may have been copied correctly. This will lead to serious security holes if you install FrontPage Server Extensions. To fix this problem, Uninstall the server extensions after you have loaded them, and re-install them again. Now stop and start the web services for the changes to take effect. This deletes the automatically created FrontPage directories which may have security problems, and re-creates them with the correct permissions. If you used the SCOPY utility, or directory replication this should not be a problem, but better safe than sorry!

Always check your site for FrontPage security!
Use a copy of Frontpage (using Frontpage 2000 or Frontpage explorer for versions <=98) to connect to your site and make sure you are prompted for a password. IIS is not always very good at setting Frontpage security when it adds a new site, which is the process when IIS Export re-creates your sites.

Alphas
At present our utility is not designed to run on Alphas. However, it may be possible to use with Alphas if you also have an i386 box with IIS4/5/6 installed. The following method has been reported to work, but we ourselves have not had opportunity to fully test.

As the IISExport utility only needs to be installed on 1 machine (and this doesn't have to be either the source or target machines), install IIS Export onto an i386 box. You should be able to specify the name of the Alpha servers in the Import/Export boxes and use the i386 box as a transport.

The following have been reported to work :

What machine(s) should I run IIS Export on?
You will need a machine to export from and a machine to export to, both with IIS 4/5 installed. You don't have to run IIS Export on either of these machines however, so if these are mission critical servers that cannot have any software loaded onto them you can install IIS Export to a third machine. IIS Export must be installed on a machine that also has IIS on it. See next section for extra notes.

What versions of IIS can IIS Export transfer?
IIS Export can transfer sites between IIS 4 and/or IIS 5/6. Very few IIS 5 servers will be able to connect to IIS 4 servers so you may have to run IIS Export from the IIS 4 server. 

Can I use IIS Export to backup my sites?
IIS Export can store your IIS configuration in a database file which can be backed up and restored at a later date. It can also be run as part of a backup routine by using the RUNBACKUP command line option and scheduling execution using the windows scheduler service.

What are the shareware limitations?
There is only one, you can select/export/backup only one site at a time in the shareware edition. All other functions are the same. If you can't work the shareware version then you won't be able to work the registered version. The registered version allows you to select/export/backup multiple sites as a time, this is the only difference.