Chris Adams - IIS Program Manager has told me he is going to maintain his blog daily - with his view inside of Microsoft in the IIS team he knows a lot of information that we can all find very useful.

He already has some good blog entries on:

• Host Headers and SSL
• Installing IIS to a non system partition
• Log Parser Scripts
• Logging Time Taken to determine slow pages.

http://blogs.technet.com/chrisad

When you use the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to administer a web site that is configured to use Host Headers on a computer that is running Windows XP SP2 or Windows 2003 Server SP1, you may receive an authentication dialog that will not accept any credentials that you enter.

This can be seen by right clicking a web site and try to configure the Front Page Server Extensions which will open.

To work around this you could disable the loopback check

Brett Hill, IIS Technical Evangelist for Microsoft kicks off a new Podcast series dedicated exclusively to IIS.

In the first in the series Brett review’s IIS 6 security and discusses IIS 7 features including why developers should be looking now at IIS 7 capabilities.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=124807

In the second in the series Brett interviews rock star developer Rick Strahl from Westwind Technologies on his recent experience with IIS 7. Rick discusses how he much prefers working in managed code and the new world of IIS 7 modules.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=128639

Every two weeks, expect a new podcast featuring members of the IIS 7 product team and other key players in IIS technology.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=34&TagID=15

The Microsoft IIS Webcast Team is extremely excited by this upcoming week where we have 6 upcoming webcasts.  We currently have a very real-world series entitled:  "A look inside Microsoft.com Operations."  These include some very cool topics listed below -

An Insiders Look At Microsoft.com

An IIS Webcast Series

The Internet is the most volatile network in the world. It is constantly challenged by "hackers" who are content with causing chaos for Web Administrators and Developers.  The busiest web site in the world, www.microsoft.com, is managed by a group of people who know what the term "in the trenches" means.  If you are interested in understanding how the operations group at Microsoft.com does business then this webcast series if for you. From one IT professional to another, find out how Microsoft.com continues to lead the world in operational excellence and website availability.  The topics in this week long view of Microsoft.com operations will include the architecture, replication and management of website configuration and content, and network topology used to create a true "99.9" availability rating.

Here are the links to sign up for the upcoming webcast series. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/events/default.mspx, then click on the More live webcasts. link at the bottom of the page scroll to the date of the event.

Monday Nov 7, 2005 11:30am
MSCOM- High Availability Architecture

Hear from the System Engineers who operate the highest scale IIS solutions  on the Internet; including www.Microsoft.com, Windows Update, MSDN/Technet, Downloads, and more.  They will share their web hosting secrets for High Availability architectures, including the areas surrounding Network Security, Cluster & Host Level Load Balancing, and Web & Database server distributions.

Tuesday Nov 8, 2005 9:30am
MSCOM- Configuration Management of Web Farms

Get 1-on-1 with Sr. System Engineers responsible for running www.Microsoft.com and Windows Update to see how they perform scripted
administration and deployment of configuration settings across the infrastructure.  Engineers will have sample scripts and provide visibility into how they leverage various commands which release with Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0.

Wednesday Nov 9, 2005 11:30am
MSCOM- Change & Release Management Strategies

Microsoft.com Operations will provide insight into how they handle and manage software updates; such as Operating System deployments, Service Pack's & Security Patches.  They will also cover the approach used to manage application releases to environments, and strategies leveraged with the Product Development organizations (Development, Test & Program Mgmt) regarding Software Development Release Cycle (SDLC)

Thursday Nov 10, 2005 11:30am
MSCOM- Monitoring & Management of Enterprise Platform

Microsoft.com Operations is currently responsible for managing more than 2000 Windows Servers hosted in 3 remote Data Centers.  Partner up with their Sr. Engineers to understand how they leverage a suite of technologies and operational processes to establish Asset Management, Event / Log / Performance Data Collection and Reporting, as well System & Application level uptime analysis.  Session will include how they leverage Active Directory and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) within the overall framework of their solution.


Friday Nov 11, 2005 11:30am
MSCOM - Troubleshooting & Debugging Web Hosting Environments

Dive under the hood with our Sr. System Engineers at Microsoft.com Operations to see how they troubleshoot and debug the array of hosted ASP.NET applications and database driven systems.  They will provide "How  To" real life scenarios covering commonly leveraged tools such as LogParser, Server Performance Advisor (SPA), Performance Monitor, Network Monitor, and more.  The team will also cover some common debug dump analytic procedures used when those tools and corresponding data have not identified root cause of a problem.


Tuesday Nov 8, 2005 11:30am
Finding IIS Bottlenecks using Server Performance Advisor

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) has been a "black box" for many versions now. Have you had the urge to open it up? IIS 6.0 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 delivers a strong infrastructure for finding problems with Web applications. Using Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Tracing for Windows (ETW), the Server Performance Advisor (SPA) can compile statistical data on your Web applications for later review. This webcast covers the basics around SPA and ETW and looks at how to set up, configure, and analyze the data collected by SPA.