Friday, August 25, 2006

VSS Internet - Not exactly user friendly

I've been working for some time to get VSS Internet service set up on my CrystalTech dedicated machine. It's been somewhat less than easy.

If you're attempting to do it, you may come across a notification that says..

Visual SourceSafe Internet was not enabled on this computer because Internet Information Services (IIS) is not installed. Please install Internet Information Services before configuring Visual SourceSafe Internet.

This is pretty annoying when the simple fact is that IIS is running wonderfully. The problem? If you've done any customization to your virtual folders, you may not have a default website, and if you do, that default site's ID number may not be 1.

VSS Internet requires that your site ID be 1. More info on this, taken from here...

Hi,You are correct that VSS is looking for the website with ID=="1".Currently, the VSS Admin tool can only enable the VSS Internet Service on the default website, with ID==1.The RTM version will include some help pages that will allow you to enable manually the service on any website.Meanwhile, the simplest workaround may be to:1) use IIS Manager to export the websites configuration into an xml file, - open IIS manager and select the "Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager" node. - right click the node, choose AllTasks/BackupRestoreConfiguation... - click CreateBackup button - pick a filename (say "changesiteid") and click ok, close the backup dialog2) manually edit the metabase/xml file and change the desired website ID to "1" - locate the changesiteid.MD0 file (generally in %windows%\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack folder) - edit the file and replace the site id (all occurences of "/LM/W3SVC/nnnnn" with "/LM/W3SVC/1") - save and close the file3) import back the configuration using IIS Manager - right click again the IIS node, choose AllTasks/BackupRestoreConfiguation... - selec the "changesiteid" backup line, click Restore button - agree with restore, etc. close the dialogs after restore is complete4) use SSAdmin to enable the webservice on the default website.(you may also need to create manually the upload/download folders, if you encounter problems see this long thread http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2774)

Alin

This Alin dude rocks. He may have been on the VSS Internet development team or something, but he fleshes out the highly sketchy help files in VSS on his personal blog at...

http://alinconstantin.homeip.net/webdocs/scc/vss_internet.htm

Take some time to read his post, it's great.