Matevž Gačnik's Weblog

During preparation for a work presentation for a complex project (designing transport level secure, distributed, endpoint independent web services) I needed to install some benign certificates to an IIS 6 machine. All hell broke lose when I did it and (production) machine failed completely. IIS Admin service would not start, UDDI Services went down, nothing worked.

After numerous hours of trying to fix at least IIS I got an idea of what was wrong.

Apperently the MachineKeys folder, which holds machine account private keys was screwed. No matter how hard I tried reinstalling IIS nothing worked. The solution was in manually deleting MachineKeys folder, encrypting it and setting appropriate permission set.

So, if you are ever in a situation where IIS Admin service would not start causing one of the following errors and you suspect MachineKeys is the reason for it, consider the steps below:

• The system cannot find the file specified.
• The handle is invalid.
• Not enough storage is available to process this command.

Try this:

• Uninstall IIS
• Backup files in MachineKeys folder (c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\microsoft\crypto\rsa\machinekeys)
• Delete MachineKeys folder
• Create new MachineKeys folder
• Assign Administrators group, SYSTEM account full permissions
• ENCRYPT THE DAMN FOLDER (Properties, Encryption)
• Copy keys if necessary
• Reinstall IIS

Good luck.