One tool disentangles common IIS problems

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Over time Microsoft has published several utilities that are designed to help administrators disentangle problems with Internet Information Server (IIS).

To save you time and effort, Microsoft has combined four of the most commonly-used IIS troubleshooting tools into a single download called the IIS Diagnostics Toolkit.

The download package is also refreshed every 90 days with the most recent versions of each tool.

Here are the tools in this download:

Authentication & Access Control Diagnostics 1.0: This tool lets IIS administrators determine what might be the reason for a particular authentication or authorization failure. People having trouble with Outlook Web Access (OWA), for instance, can use this to determine if there are misconfigurations in IIS (as opposed to Exchange itself) that would be causing OWA to fail.

Among the settings that can be audited through the tool: Kerberos configuration, user rights/privileges (the single most common reason for authentication failures), Registry permissions and server-level permissions. (Be aware that if you lock down IIS in some ways, this tool may report those lockdowns as "authentication failures." Please be mindful of this.)

Log Parser 2.2: This is a command-line utility used to analyze server logs and do simple reporting and extraction. Log Parser 2.2 works with just about any standard log format, including logs produced by third-party tools such as Netcraft. (I've talked about this tool before.)

SMTP Diagnostics 1.0: This is a command-line tool that uses the standard Windows mail APIs to determine if there is a problem with SMTP. (I've previously covered this tool elsewhere, too.)

SSL Diagnostics 1.0: This tool attempts to determine the current SSL settings for IIS (if any) and verify that they are working correctly.

Note that the tools listed in this kit are only available as binaries for the 32-bit x86 platforms. (They will run in 64-bit editions of Windows, just not as native apps.)