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IIS Metabase

  • Article

The metabase is a repository for most Internet Information Services (IIS) configuration values. The metabase is a plain-text .XML file and can be edited manually or programmatically. The metabase is also extensible in a highly efficient manner. As your IIS deployment grows, so does the metabase; however, by using an inheritance model, explicit declarations of duplicate values is avoided, reducing overhead when configuration values need to be read form the metabase.

This section includes the following topics:

  • About the Metabase: Provides an overview of the IIS metabase.
  • Metabase Structure: Describes the hierarchical structure of the metabase, the inheritance of property values, and the metabase schema.
  • Configuring the Metabase: Presents various methods for configuring the metabase, including a discussion of history files, how to edit the MetaBase.xml file while IIS is running, and an explanation of extending the XML metabase schema.
  • Metabase Security: Describes file-level security for the metabase files, encrypted metabase properties, and auditing. This section also discusses programmatic access to metabase nodes and renaming or relocating the MetaBase.xml file.
  • Metabase Reliability: Discusses backing up and restoring the metabase.
  • Metabase Import and Export: Describes site cloning, application cloning, and creating a metabase template to import from other servers running IIS.
  • Metabase Changes for IIS 6.0: Provides an overview of the metabase properties that have changed in IIS6.0.