Exam Tip in Visual Studio .NET

Creator QR Code in Visual Studio .NET Exam Tip

You can also create a Web virtual directory on an NTFS drive by right-clicking a folder, choosing Properties, then clicking the Web Sharing tab.

FTP sites work, and are administered, similarly to Web sites. IIS installs one FTP site, the Default FTP Site, and configures it to respond to all incoming FTP requests (all unassigned addresses, port 21). The FTP site returns to the client a list of files from the folder specified in the Home Directory tab. FTP sites may also include virtual directo ries so that, for example, ftp://server01.contoso.com/pub may return resources from a different server than ftp://server01.contoso.com/vendor-uploads. FTP URLs and sites do not use default documents. Complex IIS servers may host tens of thousands of sites, each with customized settings to make them tick. Losing all that configuration information could be painful, so although a normal file system backup might allow you to restore the data files after a failure, the configuration would be lost. To back up or restore IIS configuration, you must back up or restore the metabase, an Extensible Markup Language (XML) docu ment that is used to store settings. Right-click the server node in IIS Manager and, from the All Tasks menu, choose Backup/Restore Configuration.

For more information about IIS, see the Microsoft IIS 6.0 Administrator s Pocket Consultant (Microsoft Press, 2003).

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Security for files accessed by way of IIS falls into several categories: authentication, authorization through NTFS permissions, and IIS permissions. Authentication is, of course, the process of evaluating credentials in the form of a user name and password. By default, all requests to IIS are serviced by impersonating the user with the IUSR _computername account. Before you begin restricting access of resources to specific users, you must create domain or local user accounts and require something more than this default, Anonymous authentication.

You may configure the following authentication methods on the Directory Security tab of the server, a Web (or FTP) site, a virtual directory, or a file:

Anonymous authentication Users may access the public areas of your Web site without a user name or password. Basic authentication Requires that a user have a local or domain user account. Credentials are transmitted in clear text. Digest authentication Offers the same functionality as Basic authentication, while providing enhanced security in the way that a user s credentials are sent across the network. Digest authentication relies on the HTTP 1.1 protocol. Advanced Digest authentication Works only when the user account is part of an Active Directory. Collects user credentials and stores them on the domain controller. Advanced Digest authentication requires the user to be using Internet Explorer 5 or above and the HTTP 1.1 protocol. Integrated Windows authentication Collects information through a secure form of authentication (sometimes referred to as Windows NT Challenge/ Response authentication) where the user name and password are hashed before being sent across the network. Certificate authentication Adds Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security through client or server certificates, or both. This option is available only if you have Cer tificate Services installed and configured. .NET Passport authentication Provides a single sign-in service through SSL, HTTP redirects, cookies, Microsoft JScript, and strong symmetric key encryption.

Anonymous FTP authentication Gives users access to the public areas of your FTP site without prompting them for a user name or password. Basic FTP authentication Requires users to log on with a user name and password corresponding to a valid Windows user account.

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Once authentication has been configured, permissions are assigned to files and folders. A common way to define resource access with IIS is through NTFS permissions. NTFS permissions, because they are attached to a file or folder, act to define access to that resource regardless of how the resource is accessed. IIS also defines permissions on sites and virtual directories. Although NTFS permissions define a specific level of access to existing Windows user and group accounts, the directory security permissions configured for a site or virtual directory apply to all users and groups. Table 6-2 details Web permission levels:

Table 6-2