Commerce Server Blog

I faced a strange issue during commerce site unpacking in test environment. The site packager shows the following error.

and the same error is logged in pub.log file – “Unable to access IIS.  Either it is not installed, not running, or the user does not have sufficient priviledges”

I’m running as an Administrator on the box. I believe it is due to specific sites in IIS. I removing all the sites from IIS and when re-running the site packager, I am able to install the commerce server site without issue. Removing my existing IIS sites will work fine in local machines but will not work if we try to do the same in preproduction or production machines. This has triggered me back to do research on this issue.

I binged/googled, but the solutions I find online will not solve the problem. After investigation, I found that commerce server site packaging tool is parsing all web sites one by one before installing the site. Some where the tool fails to ready IIS metadata and start throwing the error. I found that it is happening if the server has any websites which are running on https (i.e., certificates installed).  I am able to figure out the fix for this issue and the fix is assigning port 80 (with different host headers) to all the websites which uses https. After doing this change, the packager/CS 2009 site wizard is working fine. I following below approach in production environment (which may or may not work for you).

1. Create port 80 binding (with different headers) to all websites where Https is used.
2. Create the commerce site.
3. Once our site started working, remove the bindings we have created from the websites.

Not sure whether there is any other better approaches available but this procedure has fixed my problem.