About This Archive

IIS Hacks was a Windows server administration blog. It published 128 dated posts between 18 May 2007 and 26 April 2013 — notes on Internet Information Services, Exchange Server, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and the Windows client, solid-state storage, MySQL on Windows, and the security work that sat around all of it. The site remained online until October 2013; the domain later lapsed.

This site is an independent, non-commercial archive of that material. It is not a continuation of the original blog, not a relaunch, and not a business.

Where the material came from

Everything here was recovered from snapshots of the original site preserved by the Internet Archive. Full body text survived for thirty-two of the 128 posts; the rest are recorded in the complete post archive as a title, a date and a URL, because that is all that survived of them. No attempt has been made to reconstruct a post from memory, from a summary, or from another site's paraphrase of it. A page here either carries the original text or does not exist.

Attribution

The original blog was written by one person and carried a byline, an author page and a contact form. This archive is presented without attribution to its original author. No personal name appears anywhere on it, no biography has been carried over, and no replacement author, editorial team or maintainer has been invented in place of the original one. The author page and the contact page are not rebuilt; both addresses now resolve here.

None of the original site's personal or contact information has been carried over — no email address, no postal address, no telephone number, no location, and no contact form. There is no way to contact this archive and no attempt should be made to; it is a static record, and nothing on it solicits work, enquiries, subscriptions or payment.

Editorial policy

The policy is deliberately narrow, and it is the same on every page:

• Original text is restored as faithfully as the surviving snapshots allow.
• Obvious transcription damage introduced by the capture — collapsed whitespace in registry paths, dropped backslashes, mangled quotation marks in command lines — is repaired, because leaving a broken command in place would make the note actively misleading.
• First-person voice is removed. Where the original wrote as an individual, the archived version either states the fact impersonally or attributes it to the original note.
• Every post carries its original publication date and a visible archival warning.
• Nothing is added that the original did not say. No new procedures, no updated commands, no version numbers, no benchmark figures and no claims about anyone.
• Every URL is preserved exactly as it was published.

That last point is the reason the archive exists in this form rather than as a tidied-up rewrite. Links to these posts are still in circulation in forum threads, mailing-list archives and bug reports in several languages, and a link that resolves to the material it was written about is worth more than one that resolves to a redesigned index page.

Accuracy, and the limits of it

The material describes software of 2007 to 2013. Much of it is out of support and some of it is now actively wrong as current advice — a servicing command that was later superseded, a certificate recommendation that no longer holds, a management console that no longer exists. The archival warning on each page says so, and Microsoft's product lifecycle documentation is the authoritative record of what is still supported. Nothing here should be applied to a live system without checking it against current vendor documentation first.

Trademarks and affiliation

Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server, Internet Information Services, Exchange Server, Outlook, Intel, VMware, Dell, Asus, MySQL and other product names appear throughout the archive because Windows server administration cannot be written about without naming the products being administered. They are used descriptively only. This archive is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, or connected to any of the companies named in it, and no vendor logo or mark is used anywhere on the site.

The name "IIS Hacks" is the original site's name and is retained for that reason alone. In its 2007 usage "hacks" meant practical workarounds, which is what the notes are. The front page describes what the archive covers and how to read material of this age.