Running IIS Express without administrator rights

Question

I've upgraded to iis express 7.5 with VS2010 SP1. Within the release notes it specified that express is able to run WITHOUT administrator permissions. When I try to run from the commandline (powershell cmd line) I receive the same "Access Denied" error (shown below) I was getting running with IIS Express 7.

As far as I can tell admin rights is still required.

Anyone been able to run without admin rights?

The detailed error message is:

Failed to call HttpAddUrl with http://MACHINE-NAME:80/ Failed to register URL "http://MACHINE-NAME:80/" for site "WebSiteName" application "/". Error description: Access is denied. (0x80070005) 

Answer 1

It is also possible to run IIS Express as a non administrative user on reserved ports and serve requests for external traffic but you need to configure the HTTP service to allow this. The Netsh Commands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) technet page describes this in detail for a Windows 7 machine (also Vista, Server 2008 etc). As you would expect you need to run the configuration command as an administrator. Examples of the command to add and delete the permission are:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://YOUR-MACHINE-NAME:80/ user=DOMAINNAME\GroupOrUserName netsh http delete urlacl url=http://YOUR-MACHINE-NAME:80/ 

This works for me on Windows 7 and although I can't verify it, I expect the Httpcfg.exe: HTTP Configuration Utility can be used to allow this on earlier versions of Windows (XP, Server 2003).