Admin Tips
- Windows Server 2008/2003/2000/XP/NT Administrator Knowledge Base
  - Windows 2003
    - Admin Tips
      - Network
        Avoiding Metabase Corruption

Section(s): Network
Published on Aug 11, 2005.
Last Modified on Aug 11, 2005.
Last Modified by Mitch Tulloch.
Rated 4 out of 5 based on 3 votes.

IIS 6 on W2K3 has a new feature that helps prevent metabase corruption.

IIS 6 on W2K3 has a new feature that helps prevent metabase corruption, something that happened often with IIS 5 on W2K. The way it works is like this: if you enable direct metabase editing in IIS 6 and make a change to the metabase using Notepad and the change you make is not well-formed (i.e. syntactically correct) XML, then the last saved version of the metabase from the metabase history file is used to replace the corrupted in-memory metabase. Pretty cool, but don't get carried away as this won't protect you from corrputing the metabase by writing well-formed but meaningless XML!

About Mitch Tulloch

Mitch Tulloch is a widely recognized expert on Windows administration, networking, and security. He has been repeatedly awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status by Microsoft for his outstanding contributions in supporting users who deploy and use Microsoft platforms, products and solutions. Mitch has published over two hundred articles on different IT websites and magazines, and he has written or contributed to almost two dozen books and is lead author for the Windows 7 Resource Kit from Microsoft Press. For more information, see www.mtit.com .