The identity of an application pool is the name of the account under which the application pool's worker process runs. By default, application pools operate under the Network Service account, which has low-level user access rights. That is, this account provides better security against attackers or malicious users who might attempt to take over the computer on which the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service) is running. The LocalService account has low access rights as well, and is useful for situations that do not require access to resources on remote computers. You can configure application pools to run as LocalSystem, which is an account with more user rights than the Network Service or LocalService account. However, be mindful that running an application pool under an account with increased user rights presents a high security risk.

Step one, as always, is to go and take a look at what's going on in the event viewer (start>run>eventvwr.msc). There are a couple entries that will be of interest to Al. Stop Errors and Warnings in the System Log from W3Svc, and Failure Audits (you should have logon failure auditing enabled) in the System log. Here's a sample of what I produced in my event logs:

An application pool is a configuration that links one or more applications to a set of one or more worker processes. Because applications in an application pool are separated from other applications by worker process boundaries, an application in one application pool is not affected by problems caused by applications in other application pools.

Following are ways to avoid problems when you access network resources from your IIS application:

* Keep files on the local computer.

Here are a few tweaks you can make to your IIS 6.0 server to make them run a little smoother and make administration easier. This is still an ongoing piece of work and more things will be added to this.

forum posts with more links