Well this seems really obvious in retrospect, but since it cost me a good 30 minutes of troubleshooting, after being asked for help by the web admin who had already spent all day on this, I figure it is worth sharing.
Situation: retiring an old webserver, and replacing it with a new one. The new one is a Windows 2003 R2 server, built by our outsource partner. IIS is installed with the defaults. All web content from the old server is copied over to the new server.
The web admin logged on to the server and configured each of the virtual webservers with the appropriate content directory, host header etc, then started testing each of the sites. The first several worked perfectly, then he got to one that didn’t work. Type in the url and get the lovely IIS error page for a 404. The requested resource could not be found. I’m not sure what all he tried before asking me for help, but I started with the basics of looking at the site configuration. I saw nothing wrong. Yes, I did check the Home Directory, and the Documents, and site permissions, and the site logs. The site logs registered about a hundred 404′s. Then I checked the NTFS permissions on the site content, and even went so far as to reset them. Still, 404.
So we created a new directory, and a default.htm, and configured the site to use that. Success. So I copied the default.htm file over to the content that could not be found, and changed the Document settings to use the default.htm. Again, success! Feeling better, I renamed his default.asp to default.asp.old, and then renamed my default.htm to default.asp.
404. whut??? We checked again on the Documents tab and sure enough, default.asp was listed. So then I started looking at how he configured the other, working, sites. Guess what, none of them had a default.asp listed.
As it turns out, this failing site was the only one using asp pages. All the others were either static htm, or cfm pages. A default install of IIS does NOT enable asp. The outsourcer was not asked to enable asp, so they didn’t. We enabled asp in the web extensions configuration and everything started working.
You’d think that it would have been more obvious in either the error page displayed to the browser, or in the IIS logs, but it wasn’t. So remember, if the server says 404, but you cannot see a reason why….check the web extensions to make sure what you need is enabled.
other keywords: 404, Not Found, IIS, ASP
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