App_Offline -> 404 Error

Question

By simply putting a file named app_offline.htm in the root directory of your site, ASP.NET will serve the app_offline.htm file, instead of the requested page. I recently employed this feature for probably the first time. I put the app_offline.htm file on the site, and pulled up my site in Firefox. The contents of app_offline.htm displayed as expected. However, if I were to pull my site in IE, I would get a Page Not Found error that appeared as though my entire site did not exist. The OS is Windows Server 2008 R2 – IIS 7.5
What ist he problem, how can i fix this? I hope somebody can help me,

Thanks Horst

Answer 1

How big (in bytes) is your app_offline.htm ?

If I remember correctly, for IE, there was a quirk that required this file to be a certain minimum size to be recognized (512 bytes).

Read more on Scott Gu's blog about this: App_Offline.htm and working around the IE Friendly Errors feature