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Monday, April 21, 2003 8:10:22 PM
DomainReportIt PRO (DRP) was originally written as a reporting tool, but, there's more to it than that. To get started let's take a look at its reporting features first.
DRP reports on specific information in an IIS installation. The report was designed to show, as a report to be printed, the Web's:
- Index value
- Server comment
- Server Bindings
- Domain's root path on the server
- The size of the root path on the hard disk
- Whether or not the root path is a valid one
All this information provides an easy way to check on a client's Site properties without having to logon to the Web server, open the MMC, and search for the site.
The Web's index value is of particular importance if you are looking for the sites logfiles for example. Knowing the site's index value is particularly helpful while scrolling through the logfile directory and staring at cryptic directory names like w3svc4, w3svc77 etc.
Quick access to the server comment is of use if you create scripts to change settings in IIS. Searching for the site to make changes is easy if you can search for the server comment. DRP provides you with the server comment.
Server bindings gives you a quick look at the sites that may still contain old bindings you want to remove or to find sites whose bindings you need to change.
The technician charged with keeping the hard disk free of excess data and general housecleaning will find the Domain's root path value helpful. The report displays all Web sites with *Invalid* root paths. This could mean that the customer has cleaned up their files, deleted their root path and quitely dispensed of your hosting services. Or, perhaps the client has renamed the root dir and left you with a disk full of unused files taking up valuable disk space. And, most importantly, a quick glance of the report can show you who is using how much disk space. If you have no way of handling disk quotas, or simply want to double check, the report can help you to quickly find the clients with overages.
There are four reports included with DRP:
- DETAIL Report
- SUMMARY with Virtual directories
- Straight SUMMARY
- Straight SUMMARY of ONLY Invalid Domain paths
DRP also includes a feature which traverses the metabase (this is the database that contains most of the IIS data and properties) and, for each Web site in the metabase, DRP gathers the information it needs to create a vbscript which it writes to a directory on your server in the form of a bat file. Running the bat file will create a Web site in a new IIS install to match the Web site of your existing IIS install. The bat file does not create virtual directories, FTP or SMTP sites rather the Web site and its server bindings, server comment, and the application root. This is 85% of what it takes to convert your IIS install to a new server or to create a backup server or even a development server. Keep in mind, though, that since the script captures the index value of the new site it is easy to add a few lines of code to the script and create an FTP server or an SMTP server if you use these Microsoft services. Many hosting companies use third party products for FTP and SMTP so we did not make this an integral part of the script.
I will go into more detail on the vbscripts DRP creates in part two of this brief.
John Cesta
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John Cesta is a contract programmer. John's current project is designer and lead developer of the automated hosting software at bestcfhosting.com, a ColdFusion MX hosting company. John is currently working on commercializing his programs and offering them to the IIS community at serverautomationtools.com