Migrating from Apache to IIS
Recently I made the switch from Apache (an open-source HTTP server) to IIS (Internet Information Services) which is Microsoft’s own web server. I know it sounds like a strange move seeing as Apache is the industry leader in terms of webservers but I did this because I figure if I’m going to be studying for my MCSE then I should at least be playing around with IIS and learning it back to front. The other reason I changed is so I could have Exchange OWA working properly.
The changeover was relitively easy. The MySQL database required no changes so most of the work came down to configuration of the multiple domains and SSL setup. In Apache when you want to run multiple websites on the same machine you use a module called virtual host. To achieve this in IIS you use a setting called host headers, both of which are very simple to set up. Other settings that needed to be configured included the default content page (this being *.php opposed to index.htm or index.asp), document_root in PHP.ini and basic security permissions.
Once I had the websites up and running it was time to move onto Outlook web access (OWA). This is installed by default into IIS with Exchange 2003 however I was forced to recreate the OWA installation as I had messed it up while getting it to work with apache. To reinstall OWA is quite easy although you will need to have the IIS6.0 resource kit installed first. Once you have this you need to open up metabase explorer, expand LM and then delete the DS2MB key. You must then open up services.msc and restart the Exchange System Attendant Service. Once this is done (Assuming your website IDENTIFIER is 1) all the OWA virtual directories will have been recreated. This is where I got stuck for a while.. because I had deleted the original default web site and recreated a couple more, the website Identifier was no longer set to #1. Note that Exchange will only recreate the OWA virtual directories to website ID#1.
Once I had exchange OWA working it was time to move onto making it more secure. I had enabled Forms based authentication so the “pretty” login page was the first to display however if it is not under https then your passwords will be sent over plain text. My next move was to create a digital certificate. As most of you know these come at a cost however I have found a company called Startcom who provide a completely free SSL certificate which is supported by all the major browsers. After signing up it only took about 30min to have https working for my outlook web access.
The only thing I have left to setup now are permalinks. In Apache you use the mod_rewrite module however this is different in IIS. There are alternates to mod_rewrite that I could use but instead I have decided to use the custom 404 redirect method simply because it is just so easy! Well thats all from me, I could trail on for ages but you get the gist of it!
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