Product Description

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly called Internet Information Server) is a set of Internet-based services for servers using Microsoft Windows.

The servers currently include FTP, SMTP, NNTP, WebDAV and HTTP/HTTPS.

Software Pattern Summary

Platforms Supported by Software Pattern

As the software is integrated within the Windows Operating System kernel, it cannot be run on any other Operating System - as such the patterns only identify Windows installations.

Identification

Software Instance Triggers

The following patterns will only run on Windows 2003 or earlier:

The following patterns will only run on Windows Vista or later:

Simple Identification Mappings

The following processes are identified through the use of Simple Identifiers and are modeled within a full Software Instance for Microsoft Internet Information Services using the primary and associate relationships (See Application Model Produced by Software Pattern for more details about modeling this product).

Versioning

Version information for this product is currently collected using one of two possible methods, either checking the registry for an explicit version number or by checking the operating system for a version that we know maps 1:1 with a specific version of IIS.

Active Versioning

For Windows 2016 and later we can get active versioning from powershell command $PSVersionTable.BuildVersion

Registry Versioning

The primary manner in which we achieve versioning for IIS is by querying the registry for an appropriate version value.

The major and minor version numbers are retrieved and amalgamated together.

Operating System Inference

Due to the tight integration of IIS with the underlying Windows operating system a specific version of IIS can only be found in one lifecycle of a Windows release, IIS may be found in more than one version of Windows but you will not find more than one version of IIS available for a specific version of the operating system.

Due to the fact that older versions of IIS/NT are no longer used and that it is relatively difficult to tell the difference between Windows XP Pro x32 and x64 we have chosen to only provide mappings for a subset of the available IIS versions, this is to ensure that where we infer this information from the Operating System we are positive that we are providing the correct information and not providing misleading data.

Application Model Produced by Software Pattern

Product Architecture

The IIS services are integrated with the OS and started via the Windows Services manager.

Once started the software will run under a number of guises, different aspects of the service can be seen in different manners, for example the WWW .net worker process is a unique executable which handles ASP.net processes where as the actual web hosting functionality is ran using svchost.exe with the arguments "-k iissvcs".

All or some of these processes may be present on a given host, the only process that is always present on a running installation of IIS v6 is the Microsoft IIS Management Service represented by the process "inetinfo.exe". "inetinfo.exe" may or may not be running on IIS v7 and above, as only supplied for backwards compatibility purposes.

Application Model

The Software instances created by these patterns are based on the core IIS Service, the Web Hosting Service and the FTP hosting service. They create separate Software Instances for these services.

Dependency links are created between the Webserver and the IIS Service, and between the FTP Server and the IIS Service

So a typical installation might look like

Configuration Options

There is a configuration option for this product which allows to use Windows system root location (absolute path).

E.g.

sysroot_directories :=[ "C:\\Windows", "C:\\WINNT"];

SI Depth

As there can only be a single running installation of IIS on a specific host the pattern will always create a Deep/Instance Based Software Instance.

Listing of IIS Websites, Web Applications, Virtual Directories and Application pools

A separate pattern (IIS_Extended) has been created to query the IIS Websites, Web Applications, Virtual Directories and Application pools. For more information about this pattern, please refer to the relevant page

Database relationship discovery

Database relationship discovery is performed by IIS_Extended pattern, please refer to the relevant page for more details

Subject Matter Expertise

SME input would be appreciated to improve the model of IIS further.

Testing

This pattern has been tested against multiple running installations of IIS on a variety of Windows hosts.

Information Sources

A list of IIS 7.0 services is at http://blogs.iis.net/tomwoolums/archive/2009/02/13/the-services-behind-internet-information-services-7-0.aspx

http://blogs.iis.net/thomad/archive/2008/05/07/the-iis-process-model-features.aspx

Open Issues