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IIS 7.0 Learns a Few Tricks from Apache
An anonymous reader writes "According to BetaNews, Microsoft is learning a few tricks from Apache for the next release of IIS, version 7.0. Specifically, the IIS feature set has been broken down into modules to reduce overhead. Modules can be changed on the fly, without restarting the Web server. Also, the IIS metabase has been completely dropped in favor of easily editable XML configuration files. Each Web application can have its own config file that overrides the system-wide configuration."
Specifically, the IIS feature set has been broken down into modules to reduce overhead. Modules can be changed on the fly, without restarting the Web server.
I am shocked that it has taken this long to implement these features. Come on now. The rest of the industry has known that this increases stability, eases management and reduced computational overhead for years. Why is it do they think that an eight year old Linux box running Apache can serve up such huge volume versus a latest and greatest IIS server? Also, "simple configuration. IIS 7.0 does away with complicated the "Metabase" and replaces it with XML configuration files, Well, yeah! The fact that they are even talking about doing this rather than simply implementing the feature and then talking about it troubles me though. For myself, I am not running anything sophisticated for the sites I manage but I want simplicity of management and therefore went with standard OSX hosting systems. For heavier lifting, an OS X server system for our scientific databases is not quite as fast as Linux based solutions for some data types, but it is certainly easier to manage than Linux or IIS. If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.
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so if IIS is just copying Apache... then remind me why should I choose IIS over Apache?
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Can you install two different versions of IIS and have them run on different ports and/or addresses? Install or uninstall without rebooting? Change or inspect the source code?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Is M$ becoming a mass copy store...First Firefox (for IE7.0) then Apple OS X (for Vista) and now Apache (for IIS). Are they going out of business of innovation?
I was thinking the exact opposite. I like editting a plain ol' text file by hand. Editting XML is a pain; yeah it's all text but then so is Postscript.
Trolling is a art,
IIS 6.0 utilized an editable-during-runtime xml configuration file, metabase.xml. The new stuff is more integrated into a .Net Framework style config.
Editing the httpd.conf file is a real pain.
Heh, I worked with someone who thought it was a pain to edit too. His solution - he erased every single comment from httpd.conf. (He thought it was a pain because it was too long. Needless to say, tempers flared.)
wow, I guess that most slashdotters REALLY hate MS enough to not even know the characteristics of their current offerings...
Oh come on. When you install SQL Server, you have to reboot. New installations of infrastructure are a different matter than deploying a new virtual directory.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I tend to agree... sort of. Once your familiar with httpd.conf, editing it tends to be quite simple. However, trying to write an application front end to do that is a pain. This is where XML is nice. Its structured and formatted. The idea behind using XML isn't to make your life easier to edit it by hand... its to make it easier to make automated tools to edit and query the config files.
This is one of the major ways Microsft has stayed on top. The are great at collecting the best ideas from many sources and implementing them in their own software. Often implementing these ideas better than the orginal. Microsoft isn't stupid. They're always watching the market to learn how to do things better.
... At TechEd New Zealand. IIS7 looks really smart, with pluggable modules to provide all of its functionality, as the submitted mentioned. Ouf of the box pretty much everything will be disabled, and you enable only the modules you need.
IIS6 (win 2003) has already done away with the metabase and gone to an XML file for all of the configuration settings.
IIS7 goes one further, by allowing you to put configuration files in each virtual directory or website to over-ride the parent setting (if permitted) - this allows a website owner to configure their own website, without affecting the other websites on the box, or having to ask the administrator to make the changes for them.
The MS guy told me they are trying to make management as easy as possible for servers containing thousands of seperate sites. He also said they hope to release IIS7 for Win2003 R2.
Loads of other management things are coming in too, such as the ability to examine currently execting requests, and kill them without restarting the site or server (VERY usefull if a script is looping)
MS's new approach to security seems to be really paying off - IIS6 was re-written from the ground up, and how many security holes have there been? I can't remember any.
Running in prefork MPM is fine for the most part, but I really wish perchild would get off the ground so that PHP scripts won't be all running as the same user. Now if only all of PHP's modules were thread safe...
suPHP will take care of that for you. Well, the user bit, not the thread safety bit.
http://www.suphp.org/Home.html
Why?
"The popular open source Apache Web browser takes a similar approach to features."
Does it support tabbed browsing?
Insert Generic Sig Here:
If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.
I'd settle for a better IIS-FTP component, the one in IIS 6 is a bit of a joke. As for the Metabase , yes it could be more transparent but it isn't that complicated and there is an excellent programming interface for it. Most of all I'd really like to see Microsoft cough up the ability to configure absolutely every aspect of IIS (and Windows it self for that matter) from the commandline. Basically I want the option of being able to do absoloutely everything I can do with the Windows GUI admin tools but over a lousy GPRS connection via a remote text based shell. And this to the point where I don't have to see a Windows desktop for months should the need arise. Even in Windows 2003 the commandline toolkit that comes with Windows is incomplete although Microsoft does offer a bunch of administrator toolkits that help alot but I still fail to see why these have to be tracked down and downloaded seperately rather than being supplied with the OS.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Would have been nice had he done one of these first:
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.bak
.bak you can accidently write a bad copy over a good one. Even worse is finding things like:
mv
Heh, fat chance with that guy. I usually append a bind type serial number (2005091501) to the end of a copy. If you just use
httpd.orig.bak3 or
httpd.conf.this.one.works2.bak
in the conf directory.
Okay...So I guess the OP fixated on one thing (modular configuration snippets) and wrote off all IIS efforts as copying.
It is this complacent attitude that will get Apache's ass handed to it.
When I last checked, Apache has no way (short of parsing the config file with your own crappy scripts using unreliable regexen ) for you to inspect the current configuration. IIS has this, the entire object model of the server configuration is available for inspection from the scripts, guaranteed to be accurate.
Apache needs to provide (if not a more structured file format), a set of script-callable APIs for configuring and managing the server.
Grepping the config file and making one or two changes then restarting may be sufficient when you're running 10 or 20 sites in production, but when you're hosting 1000s, you need something better.
IIS is also completely manageable from scripts, and I cast envious glances at the things our IIS admins are able to do with scripts. Create new vhost: Check. Temporarily disable vhost: Check. Modify vhost properties at runtime without bouncing the entire server: Check.
Apache doesn't have anything equivalent (unless you count the big-hammer apachectl START/STOP/GRACEFUL) as "management". Or you write your own. (Yeah, we all have time to reinvent that wheel.)
Apache is playing catch up here in every sense.
And this comes from someone who runs tonnes of sites under Apache in production.
Believe me, generating Apache configuration from a canonical source (i.e. a database) is a royal pain in the ass, but currently the only way you're really going to manage 1000s of sites with Apache if you're offering hosting services.
This management is the single biggest thing missing in Apache today.
Did anyone at Apache remember to patent hot-swappable web server modules?
Why do that? Isn't the point of open source the spread of technology ideas? So what if the evil empire uses Apache's server fu? It's their right, just as it's your right.
You've got this backward. Apache doesn't have an XML configuration file. It also doesn't have hot-swappable modules. If IIS now has these features, then it will be Apache that needs to catch up.
Apache has plenty of good features. I don't honestly know how it compares to IIS and I don't much care because I want to run on unix. But it is not perfect. These are two areas where it could improve.
(Why do so many people here think that Apache does have these features?)
Yes, they are innovative. Clippy is the most innovative offering of its kind since Chinese water torture.