PowerShell is an automation platform and scripting language for Windows and Windows Server that allows you to simplify the management of your systems. Unlike other text-based shells, PowerShell harnesses the power of the .NET Framework, providing rich objects and a massive set of built-in functionality for taking control of your Windows environment.

We can use PowerShell scripts in two ways, PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) and PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE).

PowerShell DSC:

PowerShell DSC is a platform for testing and ensuring the declarative state of a system. DSC allows you to scale complex deployments across environments, enables collaboration of management, and corrects for configuration drift.

PowerShell ISE:

PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) is a Windows application that supports enhanced usage of PowerShell for beginners and experts alike. ISE’s many features include:

• A built-in editor for writing, testing, and debugging scripts
• Full IntelliSense tab completion, syntax highlighting, and context-sensitive help
• A myriad of keyboard shortcuts
• Support for right-to-left languages
• Extensible add-ons

For more information, you can refer to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/mt173057.aspx.

ASP.NET Core is an open source and cross-platform framework that runs on any operating system with or without an ASP.NET application pool (framework). It helps us develop and publish web-based applications independent of platforms such as macOS, Linux, or Windows Server Core. ASP.NET Core is also known as ASP.NET 5. Nano Server 2016 targets ASP.NET Core.

Once we start developing an ASP.NET Core application and publish it, it will automatically copy the all the required runtime DLLs and other files to the web application publish directory so that the core web application runs independently without requiring any framework on IIS Server.

ASP.NET 2.0 will not run on Nano.

We can build a secure infrastructure based on public-key cryptography using digital certificates with technologies such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

We need two things to publish a secure website or web application:

1. HTTPS (secure) port 443
2. SSL certificate

HTTPS is a secure communications channel that is used to exchange information between a client computer and a server. It uses SSL.

To enable SSL in IIS, you must first create a certificate that is used to encrypt and decrypt the information that is transferred over the network. IIS includes its own certificate request tool that you can use to send a certificate request to a certification authority. This tool simplifies the process of obtaining a certificate.

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to transfer files between two computers over a network and the internet.

FTP is a standard network protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client using the client–server model on a computer network. FTP’s default network port numbers are 20 and 21.

FTPS, also known as FTPES, FTP-SSL, S-FTP, and FTP Secure, is an extension to the commonly used FTP that adds support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cryptographic protocols.

Web server security (IIS server), website security, and application security can be used to configure an IIS server to protect itself and the website.

The following are the security options available in IIS server:

• Machine key
• Authentication
• Authorization rule
• IP address and domain restrictions
• ISAPI and CGI restrictions
• Server certificate
• Request filtering
• IIS Manager permissions and IIS Manager users
• NTFS permissions

We can install and configure security components on an IIS server for our website or web application that needs secure hosting.

In this chapter, we will start with some of the security information of IIS 10.0. You can try more security options if you wish to. Here, we will cover a few important parts.

Health and Diagnostics provides an infrastructure to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot the health of a web server, sites, and applications.

The advantage is the detailed trace events that track a request throughout the complete request-and-response process. To enable the collection of these trace events, IIS Server can be configured to automatically capture full trace logs, in XML format, for any particular request based on elapsed time or error response codes.

Health and diagnostics includes the following features:

• Failed request tracing rules
• Logging
• Worker processes

IIS exposes numerous configuration parameters that affect IIS performance. The following are things you need to do if you are looking for more performance; otherwise, keep the default settings:

• Disable IIS logging
• Disable IIS ASP debugging
• Tune the value of the ASP Threads Per Processor Limit property
• Enable IIS HTTP compression
• Configure ASP.NET 4 max ConcurrentRequests
• Disable WCF services tracing

When you finish your IIS 10.0 installation, you will get the default application pools and default web site. The application pool works on worker process or a set of worker processes for one or more websites.

Application pools are used to separate sets of IIS worker process that share the same configuration and application-level boundaries as your web applications. This is a really great feature of IIS and helps us run our web applications.

The benefit of application pools is that if you have an issue with one of the application pools, it will only effect the associated application pool.

Application pools enable us to isolate our web application for better security, reliability, and availability.

Two types of application pipelines are available. We can select integrated mode (supports IIS 7.5 or later versions) or classic mode (IIS 6.0).

Using multiple web hosts in Microsoft IIS 10 Server, you can host one or more websites on the same IIS 10 server. The website can be hosted using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) over Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) using the default port, 80. In general, all websites get access on default port 80 using either HTTP or HTTPS. If you run your website encrypted, the protocol protocol is HTTPS secure port.

A website is needed to access a network, either through LAN, which can be called intranet, or Wide Area Network (WAN), which can be called internet.

You need a domain name, IP address, and port to run your website or web application.

We have already performed the installation and created application pools. Now let’s start multiple web hosts on the same IIS 10 server and access the websites using their host names (domain names).

A virtual directory is a friendly name, or alias, for a physical directory on your IIS Server hard drive that does not reside in the home directory. Because an alias is usually shorter than the path of the physical directory, it is more convenient for users to type. A virtual directory appears to client browsers as if it is in the web server’s root directory, even though it can physically reside somewhere else.

A virtual directory can be used for different websites’ physical folders or different folders of the same website. A virtual directory’s physical location can be on the same IIS server or a different server, and we can mount it on an existing website.

For example, you have website pages at different locations in IIS server, such as d:VD. You can create a virtual directory and use it in an existing website. If you have a different web application that needs an application pool in the website, you can create a virtual directory and add the required application pool.

HTTP/2 is the newer version of HTTP/1.1, used to reduce the impact of latency and connection load on web servers by semantic flow over TCP connections. The HTTP/2 protocol can work on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. Windows 10 and Server 2016 both have the latest version of IIS Server, IIS 10.0. Currently, only IIS 10.0 supports HTTP/2. In HTTP/2, a persistent connection can be used to provide services to multiple simultaneous requests.

We know that every TCP connection requires a round trip to set up a connection between server and client. HTTP/2 sharply reduces the need for a request to wait while a new connection is established or wait for an existing connection to become idle.

HTTP/2 introduces HPACK, a compression scheme for HTTP headers that reduces the redundancy between requests. Compression helps multiplexing, because requests are smaller. This enables clients to make many requests in their first packets on a connection, while TCP flow control windows are still small.

HTTP/2 also introduces the concept of push: the server responds to requests the client hasn’t made yet, but in a form that the client can cache and reuse on other pages.
If push is supported by the underlying connection, two things happen:

1. A PUSH_PROMISE is sent to the client so that the client can check whether the resource already exists in the cache.
2. A new request is added to the request queue for the pushed resource.

A wildcard host or subdomain is a domain that is a part of a top-level domain under the DNS hierarchy. It is used as an easy way to create many unique web addresses for specific purposes.

For example, it could make it easier for users to remember and navigate to the demo of a product’s site by placing it at the address demo.v2mysite.com. In this case, the subdomain is demo.v2mysite.com, whereas the main domain is mysite.com.

A wildcard host or subdomain is also known as a child domain. We have a parent domain, v2mysite.com, and I’m about to show you how to create a subdomain demo prefixed with the main domain, like demo.v2mysite.com. We can have different names and unlimited wildcard hosts for our parent domain. A wildcard host or subdomain website host doesn’t require any separate payment or registration. The purpose of a subdomain is to have a separate URL of for products or training either for internal or external use. You can create unlimited wildcard hosts based on the primary domain, which requires registration, and you have to pay for an annual or quarterly subscription.

Here, you can see a few examples of wildcard hosts:

Nano Server is a remotely administrated server operating system, optimized for private clouds and local or remote datacenters. Nano Server is similar to the Windows Server core mode operating system. It doesn’t have any GUI interface, and it is smaller than Windows Server’s core mode.

Nano Server has no local login capability. It only supports 64-bit applications, tools, and agents.

Nano Server takes up very less disk space, is installed quickly, needs fewer updates and less time to restart than Windows Server.

Nano Server can be used as a:

• Hyper-V virtual machine with or without clusters
• File server
• DNS server
• Internet Information Services (IIS) server

It can also be used to run cloud application patterns or run in a container or as a VM guest operating system.

You can install Nano Server on a physical host (server) or as a virtual server. Nano Server installation can be installed on the Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2016.

In this chapter, will use IIS 10.0 on Nano Server.