Hmmm, so how's IIS 7 with WSS 3.0?

So the WSS 3.0 book has stalled, and I find myself sitting around twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the production staff to do things. So while I wait I have accepted an offer to write some courseware. This courseware will be about WSS 3.0 on Server 2008. Thus, while I have some spare time, I installed Release Candidate Zero (RC0) of server 2008 to see what has changed (Back when I had to stop beta testing what was then called Longhorn, WSS wasn't working as a role yet). This is a public beta, and available here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/audsel.mspx. WSS 3.0 seems to work normally without much change (but I'll keep you posted if something bad happens). There is something different under the covers though. Significantly different. IIS 7.0.

IIS 7.0 has been released with Vista. IIS 7.0 is going to be used by Server 2008 (which stands to reason). In order for WSS 3.0 to work on Server 2008, IIS 7.0 has to have IIS 6.0 backwards compatibility enabled-- particularly the IIS 6.0 metabase support.

So, when you use IIS 7.0, expect a very, very different console, full of all kinds of icons, several sections of repetitive links, and less capabilities. There is no backing up in the GUI. You cannot right click a Web Site or application pool and back it up. There is also no way to right click and back up (or check the backups) of the metabase.

Now, the backups happen and they work. And you can still do SharePoint backups no problem-- so the configuration data for the web sites has to work. However, the problem for me occurs when I try to backup IIS 7 on my own, just to be thorough with my backups.

Like Exchange 2007, the GUI for IIS 7 isn't where all the work goes on. IIS uses the command line tool: APPCMD.exe.

So far, I am only able (as you will see when you try out the public Release Candidate) to backup the full metabase for the server (APPCMD add backup "backupname"), but there doesn't seem to be a way to backup individual web site configuration files.

If you know something I don't, namely, how to backup the configuration file for web sites (and restore them) in IIS 7, please let me know. And if I figure it out in the meantime, I'll let you know here.