Some introduction to ADSI technology

Rare in the country to find a more comprehensive introduction to this, hehe.

Microcomputer World 1999 Phase 2nd
Microsoft provides IIS new interface
Although the Internet Information Server (Internet Information Server,iis) is now rage, it still has a major flaw, namely, the lack of an automated management interface. In other words, there is no interface that allows site builders and administrators to manage Web sites using other software or Third-party tools. From version 1.0 to version 3.0, IIS lacks the necessary support for the maintainability of personal sites. Microsoft has finally made some improvements and remedies in the newly launched IIS 4.0.

In general, all IIS management is implemented through a graphical user interface and cannot be easily automated. While this can work well on small sites with a single server with few users, it requires stronger manageability support for larger, more complex sites. The fact is that the more servers you have, the more numerous administrative tasks you have to perform. Imagine how heavy a burden it would be to have to reconfigure 20 servers each time things changed, but maybe it was a big deal. For those of you who work with the web every day, it's important to remember this quote--change is timeless. So we only expect it to get better.

There are indeed two problems in previous versions of IIS. First, there is a lack of a clear, open Interface for Third-party management products and an automated programmable interface for custom routine management tasks. Second, a mechanism for controlling directory services to enable servers on the network to discover each other is needed.
If these interfaces exist, site creators can use various types of tools to write various types of server management applications. In addition to user management and security products, they can also create programs for performance management, installation, and configuration.

To provide these missing interfaces, Microsoft released a new version of the Active Directory Services Interface (Active Directory service INTERFACES,ADSI) earlier in 1998. ADSI and the IIS Management Object (IIS administration Object,iisao) provide a federated solution to control the directory service and IIS themselves. These products were first unveiled at Microsoft's Windows NT Professional Developers Conference, and they are already available in IIS 4.0.

ADSI does not bring any innovative improvements. In short, it extracts the directory services provided by the IIS directory service and other vendors through an Easy-to-use interface called the Component Object Model (Component object model,com), which can be used to talk to traditional programming tools. COM allows you to use scripts and programs to control IIS.

Iisao can be accessed by applications compiled in many different languages, including C + +, Java, and VB. In addition to rapid growth, third-party site management tools can be better attached to IIS and directory services through ADSI and Iisao. Alternatively, Iisao can be accessed through a Web page via a server-side scripting engine and an Active server page,asp. In fact, if you are using the HTML version of the IIS 4.0 administration tool, you are already using Iisao. Iisao can also be accessed from the command line using the Windows Scripting Host (Windows Scripting Host,wsh).

Like Iisao, ADSI is just a set of COM objects that encapsulate objects in their respective directory services. This creates an abstraction layer in the local directory service and application, so site creators can control many different directory services through a single public interface.

Iisao is a provider that is registered with ADSI. When you are looking for IIS information, ADSI understands how to create an interface with Iisao. ADSI and Iisao can provide an interface for several IIS objects that can perform several different administrative tasks, such as IIsFtpServer, IIsWebVirtualDir, and IIsComputer, which means they can access the FTP server separately, Virtual directories and computers running IIS.

Through COM and a shared set of APIs, these new interfaces open most of the features of IIS and public directory services to some traditional development tools. From these interfaces, the site administrator can use COM as a conduit into the internal IIS and manage its services through a set of predefined COM objects.

The IIS Management object provides both low-level and advanced types of interfaces. Low-level objects, also known as admin Base objects (Admin Base object), provide services for the pipe-rational API. The advanced object hides the complexity of managing the base object and is easier to use than low-level objects, but it does not provide as much control as a low-level object.

So, where is Iisao? Its applications include creating a new Web server, FTP servers, and virtual directories, as well as customizing the IIS installation process. Also, Iisao enables you to programmatically change the IIS settings, and thus change the Genku (Metabase, similar to the registry, but customized specifically for IIS) that stores these settings, such as values or properties.

Iisao is organized by a hierarchical structure and mirrored to the metabase and the structure of IIS (see Figure 1). Objects are created around other objects to create an object structure. This hierarchy of objects gives you access to the Genku property that determines the configuration settings for a particular IIS element.

Figure 1 Iisao
The Iisao is organized by a hierarchical structure mirrored to the metabase and the IIS structure.

In the ADSI standard that supports the Remote Administration Directory service namespace (Namespace), Iisao is the provider of namespaces. The IIS namespace consists of Iisao and Genku. ADSI simply provides a standard syntax for configuring data addressing for IIS.

Site creators can use ADSI as an interface to make their applications connected to directories such as Active Directory (Active Directory), LDAP, and NDS. Each vendor provides a set of resources that are remapping to a common interface or to a set of interfaces that use COM. For example, by using ADSI, site creators can add users, manage printers, or create virtual Web servers. However, most of the time we use ADSI through Third-party tools rather than directly from a traditional programming language.

ADSI helps in simplifying directory usage and management, and can get a lot out of Open Directory Services interfaces (Open Directory service interface,odsi). As some people already know, ODSI provides a set of APIs to manage multiple types of directory services.

Iisao takes a hierarchical object namespace, where each object has a ADsPath. ADsPath and URLs are somewhat similar, for example, a ADsPath can be iis://davescomputer/w3svc. This adspath refers to a IIsWebService object called the Davescomputer machine. This object, together with the machine running IIS, is a IIsComputer object and contains all the other Iisao.

If you want to get a reference to a named object, you need to use GetObject in a program, such as a program written in Visual Basic.
For example, you can use the VB script shown below to get the current value of the maxbandwidth of the computer named Davescomputer:
<%
Dim ComputerObj
Dim MAXBW
Set computerobj=getobject ("iis://davescomputer")
MAXBW = Computerobj.get ("MaxBandWidth")
% >

ADSI objects can represent any item in the directory service, such as users, servers, computers, files, printers, and print sequences. Network administrators have to deal with these entities every day. ADSI defines different types of objects to represent different types of entities. Each object supports one or more COM interfaces, giving you access to the object's own information (that is, metadata, Metadata) and the information represented by the object (Figure 2).

Figure 2 ADSI Object model
Each ADSI object supports one or more COM interfaces, giving you access to the information of the object itself and the information that the object represents.

ADSI and Iisao may sound complicated, but with the advent of Windows NT 5.0, it brings a glimmer of activity to the directory and reveals the potential for NT to ultimately support enterprise-class systems. But manageability is a big problem when we see NT and IIS extending to the corporate network level and when the number of servers and users is increasing.

The advantages of these interfaces lie not only in the fact that they are easy to use, but also because they ultimately automate the management tasks with any number of languages and tools. In addition, a third-party management tool will eventually have a common interface that works with it.

Finally, we must realize that the key issue is not how to make IIS the preferred server for the enterprise, but when. It seems that Microsoft's strategy of bundling servers and operating systems is working, and it is likely that by the end of this century we will be able to find our content on IIS.