Professional Microsoft IIS 8

IIS Manager Remote Access

IIS 8.0 offers two methods for enabling site administrators to manage websites remotely: IIS Manager and the web.config file. The following sections discuss how to make IIS Manager, with its default settings, available to site administrators. Later, we'll describe using web.config. And, finally, we'll wrap up the chapter by interspersing the two methods. First, we need to talk about the components necessary for both delegation options.

Installing the IIS 8.0 Management Service

The first thing to do to allow remote access to the server is to turn on the Management Service feature. Unless it is installed and enabled, it is not possible to manage IIS 8.0 remotely through the IIS Manager console. This is the same for IIS 7.0 and 7.5, but differs from IIS 6.0, where remote administration through the console was installed and enabled by default.

When installed, the Management Service runs as the Web Management Service (WMSvc)—a standalone web server and hostable web core (HWC). An HWC is essentially an HTTPS web service inside an out-of-band process, accomplished by making a LoadLibrary call to load hwebcore.dll. Naturally, the HWC Web Service enables connections to IIS Manager over an HTTPS connection that does not depend on IIS 8.0.

In case the names seem confusing, Management Service is the name that IIS Manager calls the feature, whereas Web Management Service (WMSvc) is the name of the Windows service that does the work. The WMSvc Windows service listens ...