Thanks to all the people who helped with this problem.  The main suggestion
seemed to be to re-install IIS.  

Some people suggested I try playing with rdisk backups, unfortunatelly there
is no PDC, just workgroups, or rebuilding the user and getting the password
from the metabase which I tried, but had many problems with once I had it.
I re-installed index server which recovered index server and the CDONTS
functionallity.  I am not sure if there are any underlying problems that I
will face if it didn't re-establish the user correctly.  

Index server is not crashing now, but is not giving me any hits either, so I
am not exactly sure it is running correctly!  What permissions are involved
when reading the Index server catalogs?  Does the IUSR have to have access
to the catalogs or is it the IWAM user?

I think that regardless of the time involved I had better re-install IIS to
ensure that there are no problems down the road.  I have an error in my
event logs teling me that Active Server Pages can't read default settings
and that I should do "regsrv32 asp.dll" but when I do I get:

LoadLibrary("ASP.DLL") Failed.
GetLastError returns 0x0000007e.

So I think that there are too many things wrong here that I don't understand
:(

Thanks for your help
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Lyle [mailto:Lyle(at)lcrcomputer.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:19 PM
To: hwg-servers(at)hwg.org
Subject: RE: IIS & IWAM_User


IF you have a recent copy of the security files created by rdisk(from the
PDC) before the deletion, you could restore them and get the user id back
FROM THE PDC.  And assuming that you are using NT 3.5 or NT 4.0.

-----Original Message-----
From: Marius Zydyk [mailto:pod(at)null.net]
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 2:26 PM
To: hwg-servers(at)hwg.org
Subject: Re: IIS & IWAM_User


Neither have I, seems like pretty poor advice. There's a reason IIS doesn't
run as admin, and all security access is based on the IWAM user. I'm
surprised IIS actually starts without the IWAM user account, I always
thought it run _as_ that user, all the time, not just used it for some
security checks.

FYI, usernames are not what NT uses for security, it actually looks at the
SID, a GUID-type string created when the account is made. So all your IIS
stuff is pointing to that SID, whos user account you just deleted;
recreating that user won't help. I do believe if you recover the old IWAM
SID you can overwrite the new account's SID, but don't quote me on that. If
that's the case it may be worth the $100 to call MS support instead of
rebuilding the server.

Jonathan wrote:
>the most reliable way is to simply reinstall IIS.
>
>sorry, but i have never heard of someone recommending the removal of the
>IWAM_ account.
>
>
>At 12:22 PM 4/5/01, Charlton, Mark wrote:
>>Hi people
>>
>>I have an IIS4 server on which a security consultant informed me I
>could,
>>and should, safely remove the IWAM user.  Nievely believing him I did,
>but
>>since discovered after the server is running that I cannot use index
>server
>>or some other ASP features.  I could re-install IIS, but  I really don't
>>want to re-configure it all over again if at all possible.
>>
>>I have searched the MS technet and other sites, but cannot find anything
>>about how to re-create the IWAM user.  I have created the User/name, but
>to
>>no avail.  I assume I have to re-associate the user and password to the
>>MTS/IIS servers, but I have no idea how.
>>
>>Any assistance in how to do this would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>>Regards
>>Mark
>>
>>=====================================
>>Mark Charlton
>>mailto mark.charlton(at)saint-gobain.com
>>Tel:  (508) 795-2546
>>Fax:  (508) 795-5976
--
  Marius Zydyk -- pod(at)null.net

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