Today I have been fighting with a problem on our new IIS6 testing environments. I’ve installed all the software onto the servers and then opened IIS and browsed to one of the .aspx pages in the newly installed website. Every time that I did this I received a Page Not Found HTTP 404 error. When I browsed to a .htm or .html file, that file was appropriately displayed in the browser. The next thing I tried was opening Internet Explorer and manually entering the URL to the .aspx page. Still no luck, and yes the .htm and .html pages worked just fine. I found a web service that was installed on the server and tried to open the .asmx file only to get the 404 error again.

After doing some research I finally figured out what it was. First I’ll explain the software installed on the server. The box is Windows 2003 Standard Edition with IIS6, MS SOAP Toolkit 2.0 SP2, MSXML 4.0 Parser and SDK, a whole slew of Windows Updates and the Windows Support Tools. Don’t ask why we have some of these things installed because I don’t know the answer. I only get the box with a preconfigured build on it.

The fix. Open IIS, expand the server node and select the Web Services Extensions folder. In the Detail pane on the right hand side you will see a listing of the Web Service Extensions that are installed and their Status. In that list you should see ASP .NET v1.1.4322 (if you’re running the .NET 1.1 framework) and the Status for it will be set to Prohibited. Select the ASP .NET v1.1.4322 item from the list and click the Allow button immediately to it’s left. The Status will change from Prohibited to Allowed and you will now be able to browse to you .aspx and .asmx pages.

I’m the Igloo Coder and I finally able to get back into the Igloo.