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How to Manage IIS Servers Remotely

Managing several IIS servers can be overwhelming if you have to RDP to each server to perform your tasks. Unfortunately, there are many IT professionals still doing it the hard way by not taking advantage of this capability to manage IIS servers from their workstations.

Using IIS Manager for Remote Administration, you can manage remote IIS with the same experience as if you’re logged into the remote server since it has the same user interface.

As this setup is done on the client side where it will be used to manage the IIS servers from, make sure the remote server has its remote connections enabled under IIS Management Service (WMSVC).

After the remote server is properly configured, here are the steps to enable your workstation to manage remote IIS servers:

Steps

Download IIS Manager for Remote Administration.
For a 64-bit OS, use the inetmgr_amd64_en-US.msi. The word ‘amd’ on amd64 has nothing to do with whether you are using Intel or AMD processor.

The first time you run it, you may see a dialog box with the following error:

The IIS Management Console is not installed, but it is required for managing remote IIS Servers. Please install the IIS Management Console before installing the remote management support by opening the 'Control Panel-&amp;gt;Programs-&amp;gt;Turn Windows Features On or Off' and selecting the IIS Management Console in the Inet... [OK]

IIS Remote Administration Error

If that’s the case, just click OK and install the IIS Management Console first before you continue.

Run the inetmgr_amd64_en-US.msi (substitute this with the file you downloaded if different) and just follow the instructions until the end.
You can find the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager under Control Panel and Administrative Tools.
If you did not install IIS Remote Administration, IIS Manager can only be used to manage the IIS on your local PC. Remote Administration gives you an additional ability to connect to a different server (Connect to a Server…) as shown below:

The IIS Manager for Remote Administration 1.2 (inetmgr_amd64_en-US.msi) works on the 64-bit version of Windows 10, although it’s not mentioned in its System Requirements.

Downloads

IIS Manager for Remote Administration 1.2
IIS Manager for Remote Administration 1.2 Direct Download

How to Install IIS Management Console on Windows

Here are the steps to install IIS Management Console as a prerequisite to manage IIS servers remotely. The examples are shown using Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit.

Steps

Make sure you don’t have any RDP sessions opened during installation otherwise you will see an error.
Right-click the Windows Start Button, and click on Control Panel.
Click on Programs.
Click on Turn Windows features on or off.
Find and expand Internet Information Services, then Web Management Tools and check on IIS Management Console.
Click OK and Close when completed.
Now go back to Control Panel and change the View by Category to Small icons. And click on Administrative Tools.
You should see Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager shortcut now.
Or you can click on Windows Start Button and click on All apps and find Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager under Windows Administrative Tools

That’s it. Keep in mind that completing these steps only enables IIS Manager Console manage your local IIS. To also manage IIS servers remotely using this same interface, you still need to install IIS Manager for Remote Administration on your PC.

How to Cache Specific Static Files and Directories on IIS

As part of IIS performance tuning to improve a web page load speed, in general you want to enable browser caching by double-clicking on HTTP Response Headers in IIS Manager, click on Set Common Headers and check the Expire Web content:, then set the After: with an x number of days.

Often times though, you may want to be more granular in IIS static content caching for different type of files or all static files under certain folders. In the same way that you can disable browser caching for specific files on IIS, you can also configure the web.config to setup browser caching for specific files or directories with different lengths of time.

<configuration>
...
  <location path="favicon.ico">
    <system.webServer>
      <staticContent>
        <clientCache cacheControlCustom="public" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="365.00:00:00" />
      </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
  <location path="js">
    <system.webServer>
      <staticContent>
        <clientCache cacheControlCustom="public" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="60.00:00:00" />
      </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
  <location path="images">
    <system.webServer>
      <staticContent>
        <clientCache cacheControlCustom="public" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="30.00:00:00" />
      </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
</configuration>

In this example we can see the caching for a specific file favicon.ico is set to 1 year (365 days) and two folders js and images are set to 60 and 30 days respectively (In a format of days.hours:minutes:seconds). This means, all static files under js folder will be cached for 60 days, similarly for images folder, although for less duration since the contents change more frequently.

By caching as many static files as possible on the browser, you can tremendously improve IIS performance, which translates to better users experience in loading your site faster on their subsequent visits.

How to Make Visual Studio Code Colorize Classic ASP Code

If you still have to do development with Classic ASP or VBScript and you want to use Visual Studio Code, you’ll soon find out that even though the code editor was built by Microsoft, there’s no language colorization support for ASP code by default. Fortunately, adding the feature can be done easily using Extensions. So here are the steps to do so:

Launch Visual Studio Code and click on Go and select Go to File… or just press CTRL-P.
On the dialog box, type in the following: ext install classic asp and press [ENTER].
Another way to do it, you can just click on the Extensions icon (it should be the last one on the left-hand side (or press CTRL+SHIFT+X) and type in classic asp in the search box.
Select Classic ASP by Ilya Verbitskiy and click on the Install button as shown below:
Once installed, we still have to associate the asp file extension to the newly ASP colorizer so we don’t have to manually select ASP as the language every time we open an ASP file. As it is now, Visual Studio Code still has no way to detect it as an ASP page so it will treat it as an HTML file.
From the File menu, open Preferences and select Settings (CTRL + ,).
In Search settings box, type in “file associations” and you can either click on the Add Item button and populate the Item and Value (option 1), or you can click on link Edit in settings.json (option 2). In the older version of Visual Studio Code, only option 2 was available, but now if you only have a few entries, option 1 would be easier to do.
If you chose option 1, after adding the items, if you clicked on Edit in settings.json you should see the following:
```
"files.associations": {
  "*.asp": "asp",
  "*.vbs": "asp",  // optional
  "*.inc": "asp"   // optional
}
```
If you chose option 2 though, you have to add those in yourself.
Save the file (CTRL-S) and close it.

That’s all there is to it, now you every time you open an asp file (or vbs script for that matter), the selected Language Mode will be set to ASP and any classic ASP code will be colorized accordingly.

This is not limited to ASP only, you can always look for any language of your choice by going to Visual Studio Marketplace.

Download

Visual Studio Code
Classic ASP (Classic ASP Language Support) – Ilya Verbitskiy

How to Fix Ubuntu Missing add-apt-repository Command

If you happened to see a “sudo: add-apt-repository: command not found” error when typing sudo add-apt-repository command, then you need to install the software-properties-common package by typing the following:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties

This error typically happens when you try to add a PPA to install any program that’s not in the official repositories in Ubuntu.

How to Manage IIS Servers Remotely

Steps

Downloads

Further Reading

How to Install IIS Management Console on Windows

Steps

Further Reading

How to Cache Specific Static Files and Directories on IIS

Further Reading

How to Make Visual Studio Code Colorize Classic ASP Code

Further Reading

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How to Fix Ubuntu Missing add-apt-repository Command

Further Reading

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Steps

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