Can't create Web Application on multi-homed server

[gsmith_lsu]

I've been searching the net for the past week looking for a solution, and cannot find anything anywhere, so hopefully someone can give me some ideas that I may not have thought of.

Background:
I have a Windows 2000 domain with a member IIS 5.0 web server named www1. The server has 1 NIC with multiple IP's, so I can host multiple web sites, all under the same domain name (e.g. www.mydomain.com, dev.mydomain.com, support.mydomain.com, etc.). The additional IPs are configured in DNS on my domain controllers, and I can ping all of them by either IP address or DNS name, so I know that's working. I have created new web sites in IIS, and each one binds to its respective IP address that matches DNS. Frontpage 2000 server extensions were originally installed, and I experienced the problem. Then I installed the Frontpage 2002 server extensions to see if that would help, but it didn't. But I do like the 2002 interface much better, so I will be keeping those.

Problem:
On my computer (not the web server), I'm running VS.NET 2003. If I try to create a web application on one of the newly created web sites (the ones whose name does NOT match the actual NETBIOS name of the IIS server), I get the following error:

The Web server reported the following error when attempting to create or open the Web project located at the following URL: 'http://dev.mydomain.com/PublicWeb'. 'HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error'.

However, if I try to create a web application on "http://www1.mydomain.com" (www1 being the actual name of the computer), it works fine. The problem seems to lie with the multiple sites/multiple IPs/multiple DNS names for this web server.

Here's what I know:
1. I have NTFS file/folder permissions on all directories.
2. I am set up as Administrator/Advanced Author/Author/Contributor/Browser in Frontpage 2002 Server Extensions
3. In Active Directory, I am set up as a Domain Admin (because I am the domain admin)

Solutions that I have tried:
1. Re-installing IIS and VS.NET components (in the order described in Microsoft's KB), including deleting the original ASPNET local user account and running "aspnet_regiis -i"
2. Using host header names that match the DNS entries associated with individual IP addresses
3. Not using host header names at all
4. Adding static entries to my "hosts" file in "%systemroot%\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc" that correspond to the IP addresses (I knew this wouldn't work since DNS is working, but I am desperate and am running out of ideas)

This is so frustrating, and I'm about to take a sledgehammer to it, so if you have ANY ideas of what the problem could be, please let me know. Also, if I have left any important configuration info out, I can post additional info if needed.

Thanks in advance for everybody's help!

 

[jbhawes]

I don't know when exactly this message got posted but I have experienced the same problem on my server that hosts multiple sites.

To fix it I simply gave the asp.net user (i.e. iuser_<<server name>> and iwam_<<server name>>) permissions to read the folder.

After that I fired up vs.net and was able to create new web projects and run them.

I may be experiencing some other kinds of fallout as a reult of this, but I think it is just another security setting I need to fix. My current problem is that when I build a project the *.resx file can't be saved. The error is something like the folder is marked as executable. While I am certain it is not, I'm not sure how to fix this. Any ideas out there? I'll provide more details when my server is back up and running...I crashed it!

Note: This was not done through IIS but through Explorer.

Hope that helps anyone who runs into this problem again!

jb

 

[gsmith_lsu]

Problem solved

After lots of headaches trudging through IIS, NTFS ACLs, and DNS, I finally decided to rebuild my web server. It works fine. I have no idea what the deal was; my guess is that something in IIS got corrupted somehow. Here are the steps I took to reinstall:

1. Installed Windows 2000 Server with IIS; I did NOT install Frontpage Server Extensions 2000
2. Installed drivers, added computer to domain
3. Installed SP-4
4. Installed Frontpage Server Extensions 2002
5. Installed Visual Studio .NET 2003 Web Server Components from the setup CD, which included installation of the Windows Component Updates.
6. Added additional IP addresses to the web server, and added their corresponding DNS entries to DNS server.
7. Created a new web site using a static IP, whose host header name matched that of the DNS name of that particular web site (i.e., IP Address 192.168.1.23, DNS name=www.mydomain.com, Host Header=www.mydomain.com)
**NOTE** I created a folder to hold the web site NOT under the default C:\Inetpub. The first time I tried all this stuff, I tried to move C:\Inetpub to a different drive, and I think that's where everything started to go downhill. I just left the default web site alone. Also, since I'm doing forms authentication using Active Directory, I changed the anonymous account to a low-privileged domain user account.
8. Configured FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions for that web, adding domain accounts for management access

Voila, it worked.

Oh well. Hope that helps someone else who has already or will eventually have this problem.