Web Server IIS Mastery Course

Associate two websites to the same application pool and observe shared session state across sites; note that pool recycling affects both sites, so use this design with caution.

Associate two websites with a different application pool to isolate sessions, then recycle one pool to show the other website remains unaffected.

Explore cpu settings for application pools, including limit percentage, limit actions such as no action, kill, throttle, and throttle under load, and processor affinity on multiprocessor servers.

Explore the process model in the advanced settings of application pools, covering event log, identity, idle timeout, load user profile, maximum worker processes, health monitoring and ping to optimize performance.

Implement rapid fail protection in IIS by selecting http level or tcp level responses for load balancers. Understand 503 errors vs connection resets and configure shutdown threshold with shutdown executable.

Master advanced IIS application pool recycling by configuring overlapped recycle, config-change recycling, and private and virtual memory limits, while using zero to disable regular recycling and thresholding at 1000 requests.

Set application pool defaults to enforce common settings across multiple websites, so new application pools inherit predefined options such as 32-bit, private memory, and recycling interval.

Enable or disable anonymous authentication on an IIS website to control access to public areas, defaulting to the application pool identity and requiring impersonation to run as the logged-in user.

Compare basic and digest authentication in IIS; basic sends credentials unencrypted (base64), while digest hashes them and requires a domain. The lecture demonstrates enabling, testing, and using Windows accounts.

Learn how Windows authentication uses encrypted credentials and Windows accounts to authenticate the application, compare it with basic and digest, and configure it on the server including a registry step.

Explore how https secures web traffic using SSL and asymmetric encryption, and how a certificate authority and SSL certificate establish a trusted connection between clients and the web server.

Learn to install and bind an ssl certificate on web server, including creating a self-signed test cert, generating a certificate request, and importing GoDaddy certificate for https on port 443.

Learn how to backup and restore SSL certificates for a web server by exporting the certificate with a password, then importing it to restore and reuse on another server.

Explore ssl certificate types, including wild card, unified communications, domain validated, organization validated, and extended validation certificates, noting how each secures domains and the level of verification.

Configure and trust a self-signed certificate in IIS using PowerShell, export and install it in the local machine trusted store, and update bindings to remove https warnings.

Explore configuring IIS client certificate mapping authentication to secure apps with SSL. Learn to enable many-to-one and one-to-one mappings, require SSL, import client certificates, and test authentication using HTTPS.

Introduce the URL rewrite model and how redirects and rewrites optimize URLs for consistency and SEO. See practical examples like enforcing HTTPS, lowercase URLs, and friendly, user-ready paths.

Learn to enforce lower case URLs with the rewrite model in IIS, ensuring redirects use lowercase paths. This prevents duplicate links and improves SEO by providing a unique URL representation.

Install and use the URL rewrite module in IIS to redirect non-www to www by creating a canonical domain name rule, select the primary host, and verify the redirect works.

Learn to redirect an IIS site to a down for maintenance page using rewrite rules, a 503 status, and a simple optional IP-based access control.

Install health and diagnostics features for IIS, including request monitoring, tracing, and logging, then monitor worker processes and application pools for request times, cpu usage, and private and virtual bytes.

Explore how IIS logs all requests by default, customize log fields and formats, and enable the advanced logging module to publish real time events and monitor site activity.

Configure logging options to optimize performance, including disabling logging when possible for best performance. Edit the log definition to select only necessary fields and apply optimized options.

Disable debugging in production to optimize server performance by setting debug to false in dotnet compilation, or in IIS ASP debugging properties for both client and server side.

Increase threads per processor from 25 to 50 (up to 100) and monitor performance, then adjust concurrent threads per CPU and concurrent requests per CPU in web.config for ASP.NET.

Explore http compression in iis to reduce bandwidth by enabling dynamic and static compression, configuring size thresholds, cache directory, and per-application pool disk space, while monitoring cpu utilization.

Adjust advanced application pool settings to optimize resources and performance, including CPU options, limit actions, and limit percentage, while setting the time interval to zero to prevent recycling in production.

Enable and configure output caching in IIS to speed up dynamic pages by caching data in memory. Choose kernel mode caching or user mode caching; monitor with Performance Monitor.

Isolate your website directory on a separate partition and apply least NTFS permissions, limiting access to the application pool user with read and execute rights.

Configure the web server firewall to allow only port 80 for http and 443 for https, and disable other rules to reduce vulnerabilities, using Windows firewall inbound rules.

Use the request filtering model to filter URL requests and protect your web server by configuring allowed extensions, maximum content length, query string length, and HTTP verbs.

Learn to protect your web server with IP and domain restrictions by configuring dynamic restrictions, blocking high frequency requests, and logging, with options to allow or deny IP addresses.

Learn to configure mime types on a web server to control which file extensions can be hosted or downloaded by clients, remove unwanted types, and add custom extensions safely.

Enable logging on your web server to monitor activity, apply the latest Microsoft security updates, and back up data with Windows Server Backup using scheduled or on-demand backups.

Learn how to create a virtual directory in IIS to share a common folder across two websites, pointing to a physical path and enabling access from both sites.

Install and configure the FTP server feature via server manager, create an FTP site with binding and authentication, and test remote access (port 21) with a client like FileZilla.

Install WordPress on an IIS server using the web platform installer, auto configuring MySQL and WordPress, then create a new website with a host name and security keys.