Blogs‎ > ‎

Why Appcmd is Useless on a Hosting Server

posted 2 Jul 2015, 15:41 by Andrew at Lycom   [ updated 2 Jul 2015, 15:41 ]
Not sure I like each newer incarnation of the IIS management interfaces, it seems harder to drill down and find the information you need.

So, I resorted to Appcmd, ran

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD list sites

But, guess what I got?

ERROR ( hresult:8007007a, message:Failed to generate item output.
The data area passed to a system call is too small.

Turns out there is a bug in Appcmd when you run it on a server with more than 70 bindings! Good grief Microsoft, do you not expect people to host websites on your servers?

So, in order to find which site was binding to a particular IP address I resorted to taking a copy of the applicationHost.config file

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config

Loading it up in a text editor (I like Notepad++) and searching for the IP address I needed showed me that another web site was also sharing the address in question. Now, why was that so hard to find?