Question

Our team at work has written a wrapper application/interface to install a series of msi’s silently using msiexec.

My issue relates to installing the msi’s directed at IIS.

I keep getting the following error

Error 1314. The specified path ‘Default Web Site/ROOT/someVirtual’ is
unavailable. The Internet Information Server might not be running or
the path exists and is redirected to another machine. Please check the
status of this virtual directory in the Internet Services Manager.

The msi gets executed with the following parameters set as follows

msiexec.exe /i "D:\SOME.msi" UseShellExecute="false" TARGETSITE="Default Web Site" TARGETVDIR="someVirtual" TARGETAPPPOOL="DefaultAppPool" /qn /l* D:\SOME_log.txt

I realize this issue is stricly IIS related as I’m probably missing some setting/option that i need to setup.

As far as I can see my virtual is in this location “NT4334RB\Sites\Default Web Site\someVirtual”, so my best guess would be that “Default Web Site/ROOT/someVirtual” – ROOT is the issue and needs to be set, but to what? and how?

I just came across this line in the logfile – I think this might be of use?

Getting AppRoot From Url key ‘TARGETURL’

Answer 1

Seemed like my issue was related to me not specifying the metabase path correctly.
I ended up adding a helper in my code to the likes of this.

Found various solutions on SO (this got me thinking in the right direction), & I also installed something called IIS Metabase Explorer which was quite useful

//Added for reference purposes
//HasRequiredOption("site|s=", "The site location", c =>
//AddOrUpdateAdditionalMsiProperty("TARGETSITE", BuildMetabasePath(c)));

//apppool => TARGETAPPPOOL
//virtualdir => TARGETVDIR

/// <summary>
/// Builds the meta-base path.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="websiteName">Name of the website.</param>
/// <returns>The fully constructed meta-base path</returns>
private string BuildMetabasePath(string websiteName)
{
    return "/LM/W3SVC/" + this.GetWebSiteId(websiteName);
}

/// <summary>
/// Gets the web site id.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="websiteName">Name of the website.</param>
/// <param name="serverName">Name of the server. Defaults to: localhost if none specified</param>
/// <returns>The website id</returns>
private string GetWebSiteId(string websiteName, string serverName = "localhost")
{
    using (var entries = new DirectoryEntry(string.Format("IIS://{0}/w3svc", serverName)))
    {
        var children = entries.Children.Cast<DirectoryEntry>();
        var sites =
           (from de in children
             where
             de.SchemaClassName == "IIsWebServer" &&
             de.Properties["ServerComment"].Value.ToString() == websiteName
             select de).ToList();

       if (sites.Any())
       {
          return sites.First().Name;
       }
   }

  return "-1";
}