Michael Freidgeim's Blog

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 #

Syncronize IIS servers in a web farm to enable ETags

It’s known that on web Farm using of eTags under IIS doesn’t work properly unless all servers are synchronized.
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=922733 suggests to
synchronize the ETag values on all the Web servers that are running IIS using Mdutil.exe that should be extracted from Windows CD

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/07/high_performanc_11/#comment-14835
suggests to use iiscnfg.vbs script (with the /copy switch) to keep cluster configuration synced up, this keeps the MDETAGCHANGENUMBER synced up too.

http://www.upgradenrepair.com/Software/Microsoft/Windows%20Server%202003/Library/I/iiscnfgvbsconfig.htm has more details about Iiscnfg.vbs

Finally I found extended recommendations how to synchronze IIS databases in
http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2006/06/07/IISCnfg.vbs---IIS-Settings-Replication.aspx
It has customized MetabaseMerge.bat script, that seems the most appropriate for the job.

Alternative solution is described on codeProject Synchronize file date time on multiple IIS servers and fix ETag discrepency

Related links:
http://blogs.iis.net/chrisad/archive/2006/12/18/iis7-deployments-calls-for-etag-usage-review-if-using.aspx