Best Practices for Maintaining Metabase Integrity (IIS 6.0)

Enable edit-while-running. This ensures that changes made to the metabase configuration while IIS is running are written to the on-disk metabase.

Always back up the metabase before making configuration changes. Make the right kind of backup. A password-protected backup is cleanly transportable to other systems, while a backup made without a password is tied to the system on which the backup was made.

When editing the metabase with a text editor, use a text editor that write-locks the open file. This prevents the possibility of more than one person editing the metabase at a time.

After editing the metabase, open the file in Internet Explorer 6 or above. Any errors in the XML syntax will be displayed when Internet Explorer opens the file.

Never allow changes to the metabase by more than one entity at a time. For example, do not edit the metabase by hand at the same time an administrative script that changes metabase settings is running.

If you make changes to the metabase and it does not load properly, use a file comparison tool to compare the backup you made before editing the metabase with the edited metabase. This can help pinpoint any unintended changes.

Recoverable metabase schema errors occur when text editing yields well-formed XML but one or more properties are invalid, according the metabase schema.

Editing the metabase schema is not supported.

If the metabase contains incorrectly formatted XML, IIS cannot read the metabase and will not run. You can restore the last good history file to correct this problem.

If an invalid configuration is created in MetaBase.xml, the error cannot read property is logged to Event Viewer, but the rest of IIS keeps running.