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t1234stoday at 1:43 AM18 repliesview on HN

Does anyone use IIS anymore?


Replies

prussiantoday at 2:36 PM

I do. As others have replied, Windows Server--including IIS, means you have a domain joined machine, likely with an SPN of HOST/MACHINE.DOMAIN. Windows services and IIS App Pool Identities log in with an (g)MSA or virtual accounts (NT Service*) and you get a fully working and managed Kerberos experience without having to deal with 30, 60, 90 day password rotations. Log into your MS SQL Server with Kerberos, log into some other webapp's oauth2 flow with Kerberos, etc, it all just works. You can use WinRM with your native Windows shell without having to do anything special, and even technically bypass 2FA since that's just how it really works.

Can you do all this on Linux? Yes. Will it ever be set up correctly? Depends where you work, but based on my experience so far, not likely.

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samplatttoday at 3:29 AM

Way, WAY too many corporate IT divisions.

chainingsolidtoday at 5:24 PM

I've seen it used to deliver 'apps' that 90% of a business's employees use. (EX: Met/Team) in the Metrology (calibration) space.

bartnptoday at 4:41 PM

Yep.

And as an ignoramus: what it is that you are supposed to be using nowadays?

Think in the context of a small company making enterprise .NET (framework) code where Windows is the world, cloud wouldn't fly with the customers, SOAP is still king and your one IT guy is too busy to notice anything happened after 2010. Suppose also that entire software rewrites are impossibly impractical, and that while you'd love to take some security gains, you just don't have the capacity to do configuration deep dives let alone to gamble on something complex like Kubernetes.

naturalmovementtoday at 3:20 AM

Some banks still use IIS.

Every large company big enough to host an intranet is running IIS somewhere, possibly everywhere. It integrates well with AD so some really complex tasks become stupid simple.

It's seeing less and less usage as the world moves to AWS which is equally stupid because you're tied to one vendor's proprietary products (Amazon) again. Except this time you don't own the hardware.

Public sector IT loves IIS. Check your municipality's tax or property website it's probably got .aspx scripts out the ass.

I've seen it hosting European web apps, public sector if I recall. Lots of bespoke .NET applications out there with SQL Server backends running entire local governments.

Asian countries especially China and Taiwan love IIS and use it to host anything and everything. This is a personal observation.

Sure the world has mostly moved on, but there's tons of legacy code out there that keeps cities and really important organizations humming that runs on IIS and it's never changing.

You think that's bad, there's still places out there running AS/400 stuff on the web, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise (gasp).

qingcharlestoday at 2:09 AM

Yeah, I regularly speak to folks still running IIS on Windows Server. There are a lot of old apps out there, sadly. Some really, really important ones.

thedougdtoday at 3:08 AM

Amazingly some companies like Hyland still ship software that requires IIS. Bonus add are the pages and pages of setup instructions.

dagacitoday at 10:35 AM

IIS also sits at the back of a many "modern" cloud web type services.

AznHisokatoday at 3:47 AM

A lot of big corps still use it.

https://bloomberry.com/data/windows-server/

y2244today at 12:19 PM

Lots and lots

A lot of Microsoft devs know very little Linux historically as they used windows and are comfortable with it

Decreasing due to cloud and Nodejs takeup

vlan0today at 1:53 AM

The entire solarwinds platform(barf)

catmanjantoday at 12:37 PM

SharePoint uses it extensively

swarnietoday at 5:45 AM

I would say 75% of my webservers are IIS.

Nothing internet facing mind.

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esikichtoday at 3:36 AM

Yes, but typically just internal corporate intraweb stuff from what I've seen.

formerly_proventoday at 9:50 AM

The text uses target.com as a placeholder but they actually also have an IIS blue screen: https://knslsd.target.com/

mpynetoday at 2:21 AM

Tons of the Navy's public websites still run on it.

jimt1234today at 5:42 AM

Back in the early-2000s, I passed the Microsoft certification exam for IIS. I had never even heard of the product (I was told my company had some extra credits at the testing center, I was there taking another exam (Solaris 8 certification), so I figured why not?) I know, MCSE exams were notoriously simple back then, but good god - usually, for every question, 3 of the 4 possible answers didn't even make sense. Anyway, I figured there was no way IIS would last if any dipshit could become "certified" in the product.

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