How To Perform an Unattended Installation of IIS 6.0

Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0 is no longer installed by default with the operating systems that are listed in the "Applies To" section of this article. This article describes how to perform an unattended installation of IIS 6.0 on these operating systems.

To perform an unattended installation of IIS, do either of the following:

• Use an answer file that includes IIS setup information during the installation of the operating system.
• Use the command-line tool for adding and removing Windows components, Sysocmgr.exe, after the operating system has been installed.

For more information on the syntax and use of Sysocmgr.exe and on performing an unattended installation of a Windows operating system, see the "References" section.

The answer files for both of these methods are similar. For the IIS portion of setup, you must specify the proper components in the "Components" section of the answer file. For IIS, the following optional components are installed:

• BITSServerExtensionsISAPI - Installs the IIS ISAPI to allow Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) uploads.
• BITSServerExtensionsManager - Installs the BITS management extension in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
• iis_common - Common Files: Installs required IIS program files.
• iis_doc - Documentation: Installs documentation about publishing site content, and Web and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server administration.
• iis_ftp - FTP service: Provides support to create FTP sites that are used to upload and download files.
• fp_extensions - FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions: Enables authoring and administration of Web sites with Microsoft FrontPage and Visual InterDev.
• iis_inetmgr - Internet Information Services Snap-In: Installs the IIS administrative interface in the MMC.
• iis_nntp - Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) Service: Distributes, queries, retrieves, and posts Usenet news articles on the Internet.
• iis_smtp - Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) Service: Supports the transfer of electronic mail.
• iis_www - World Wide Web Service: Uses the HTTP protocol to respond to Web client requests on a TCP/IP network.
• TSWebClient - Remote Desktop Web Connection: ActiveX control and sample pages for hosting Terminal Services client connections over the Web.

In the Components section, you set these values to either ON or OFF, as follows: Note IIS 6.0 does not provide the option to create the Scripts virtual directory under the default Web site during installation, although this option is available in earlier versions of IIS. Therefore, you cannot use iis_www_vdir_scripts in an answer file for an unattended installation. This change helps to provide security. If you need a virtual directory, you can create the virtual directory manually, or you can create the virtual directory by using a script after IIS is installed.

Note Windows always looks for the media that the server was originally installed from. If the server was installed from a CD, the unattended installation prompts you for the Windows CD. If you want to run the unattended installation and use media that is stored on a network share, you must change the value for the SourcePath subkey and the ServicePackSourcePath subkey in the following registry subkey: Change the values for the SourcePath subkey and the ServicePackSourcePath subkey to the appropriate network shares. The path must contain the i386 folder.

For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: