After a late night session doing some work on a new webserver, I found a really important blog post (windowsitpro.com) for IIS administrators. The blog post shows how you get the password of the IUSR and the IWAM local accounts form the metabase.

Normally the IUSR and IWAM password are set automatically and unknown. But if you import the metabase on another you have to change the passwords of these two users (IUSR_<local machine name> and IWAM_<local machine name>).

• First you have to update the adsutil.vbs script (localdiskdrive:\Inetpub\AdminScripts). You have to replace all the “”IsSecureProperty = True” with “”IsSecureProperty = False” otherwise the command would not show the real password.
• Now you can run the following commands to get the password of these users

Get the IUSR password:

C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/anonymoususerpass

return:

anonymoususerpass : (STRING) “password”

Get the IWAM password:

C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/wamuserpass

return:

wamuserpass : (STRING) “password”

• you also can set the passwords for those accounts in the metabase

Set the IUSR password:

C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/anonymoususerpass “password”

Set the IWAM password:

C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/wamuserpass “password”

• after you change the passwords, you should sync the password from IIS with Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and component services with the following command

sync MTS:

C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>cscript.exe synciwam.vbs -v

Thanks to John Savill