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Hack 55 Restore the Metabase
While it's simple to restore
the metabase from a backup, what if you have no backup or
can't open the GUI? Use this hack.
In [Hack #54], we explored
several ways of backing up the metabase, including backing up the
machine's System State information using the Backup
utility, saving the configuration in Internet Services Manager with
MetaEdit (a downloadable tool for IIS 5), and using the history
feature of IIS 6.
Restoring the metabase from backup is equally straightforward. If you
are recovering your machine from a disaster, the metabase is restored
as part of the System State information you previously backed up,
assuming you didn't change the default option of
including System Protected Files in your backup. Alternately, if
you're restoring the metabase on a working machine
to recover a previous good IIS configuration, simply select the
backup in the Configuration Backup/Restore dialog box and click
Restore. Then, follow the prompts and wait as IIS stops, rebuilds,
and restarts. Restoring the IIS 6 metabase from a history file is
done in the same way: just select a history file in the Configuration
Backup/Restore dialog box and click Restore.
Notice that the dialog box (refer back to Figure 6-2) displays both metabase backups stored in
%SystemRoot%\System32\inetsrv\MetaBack and
history files stored in
%SystemRoot%\System32\inetsrv\History in one
combined list. You can tell the difference between a history file and
a backup file in this list by looking at the filenames: all history
files are named Automatic Backup and are
distinguished in the GUI only by their timestamp, while backup files
you create are named whatever you decide to call them.
It all seems so simple, but what if your metabase becomes corrupt and
you need to restore it from backup? If you can start Internet
Services Manager, you can use the Configuration Backup/Restore dialog
box as described earlier. But if the metabase is corrupted beyond the
ability of IIS to repair it, Internet Services Manager might not even
start, and then you're stuck. What do you do?
You could restore the entire System State of your machine from backup
media. Unfortunately, that might have unpleasant side effects,
especially if you're running IIS on a domain
controller. For example, all those users and groups you created since
the last backup will suddenly be gone (unless you have another domain
controller to replicate the information). There might also be changes
to the Registry that will be rolled back, and these changes might be
harder to troubleshoot.
But there's a better way.
Manually Restoring a Backup in IIS 5
If you can't open Internet Services Manager, try
replacing the metabase with its most
recent backup.
First, stop all IIS services by typing net stop iisadmin
/y at the command prompt (or use iisreset
/stop if you prefer). Then, find the metabase.bin
file in %Systemroot%\System32\inetsrv
and rename it metabase.bad (keep it
in case you need it later). Copy your backup file (it probably has
the extension .MD0) from
%Systemroot%\System32\inetsrv\MetaBack to
%Systemroot%\System32\inetsrv and rename it
metabase.bin. Now, restart the computer. You
should once again have a working IIS configuration and be able to
start Internet Services Manager.
By the by, instead of rebooting your machine, you can try to restart
IIS services by typing iisreset /start from the
command line. But in my experience, it's better to
reboot your machine, because IIS is sometimes a little flakey after a
restore like this.
Restoring without metabase backups
What if you don't have any metabase backups in the
inetsrv\MetaBack folder? Perhaps you deleted
them all or you never created any in the first place. Hopefully, you
do have a recent backup of your system driveon tape, perhaps?
Use the Backup utility to restore the inetsrv
folder from backup to a new location
(C:\inetsrv2, for example) and repeat the
previous process by copying C:\inetsrv2\metabase.bin
over
%Systemroot%\System32\inetsrv\metabase.bin. Be
sure to stop the IIS services as before, and reboot the machine when
you've finished.
Restoring without a backup on tape
But what if there are no metabase backups in your MetaBack
folder and you don't even have a working
backup on tape?
Here's a hack you can try that just might work: look
in the inetsrv folder on your machine for files
named metabase.bak or
metabase.bin.bak. If you find one,
you're in luck; this is a temporary metabase backup
created by IIS when it has problems updating the metabase due to
corruption. Normally, this temporary file is deleted once a
successful metabase update is performed, but if your metabase
corruption was caused by some interruption in the update process (a
server glitch or hiccup), IIS might not yet have gotten around to
deleting the temp file and you can use it to restore your
configuration. Simply stop the services, rename
metabase.bin to
metabase.bad, rename metabase.bak
to metabase.bin, and reboot the
machine.
Reinstalling IIS
In the worst case scenario, you have no tape backup, nothing in the
MetaBack directory, and no temporary
.bak file in inetsrv. What
do you do? Use Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel to first
uninstall IIS and then reinstall it. After you uninstall it, you
should also check the %Systemroot%\System32\inetsrv
folder (which is not deleted by the uninstall process) for
a file named metabase.bin. If you find one,
delete it before reinstalling IIS.
Moral of the story? Sometimes a reinstall is the only way to recover.
Manually Restoring a Backup in IIS 6
Remember that the metabase in IIS 6 is structured differently
[Hack #54]; it consists of two files,
MetaBase.xml and
MBSchema.xml, instead of
the single metabase.bin file used by IIS 5.
Fortunately, you normally have to restore only the
MetaBase.xml file, because it's
highly unlikely that you would have made changes to the schema. The
procedures to follow are identical to those described in the previous
section, except you replace metabase.bin with
MetaBase.xml in each step where
metabase.bin occurs. I've also
found that restarting IIS by using iisreset /start
seems to work fine and you don't have to reboot. IIS
in Windows Server 2003 does seem more robust than IIS in
Windows 2000.
See Also
[Hack #59]
