Getting "Service Unavailable" error when browsing IIS website

Question

I have a website in IIS 6.0 using an application pool with a custom service account. When I browse the website, I get an error "service unavailable" and the error in event log says

The identity of application pool 'SampleAppPool' is invalid, so the World Wide Web Publishing Service can not create a worker process to serve the application pool. Therefore, the application pool has been disabled.

I think the utility "Aspnet_regiis" can be used to grant access to an account to IIS metabase according to this article, but is that the right way to fix this issue? Because this utility is used for multiple things and may do more than just granting the permissions to the account, or should I just add the account manually to IIS_WPG group?

Answer 1

When I see this in IIS 6 and the user has a custom app pool identity, the problem typically originates in the entry of credentials in the app pool properties. So there are generally two origins for the issue.

One is a simple typo in the credentials, unfortunately the form validation is not very good in IIS 6, so I often will have users change the identity of the app pool, then immediately check that the credentials "took" and/or check the System event log for W3SVC and related errors.

The second specific cause I see in this scenario is when people enter an Active Directory user, they sometimes forget to add the domain name. (e.g. DOMAIN\Username). Which leads me to the next point, the IIS_WPG is the builtin local group which grants members the required ACLs to run as an app pool identity. The aspnet_regiis.exe -ga grants the same thing to users, but IMO it is best suited for use when the IIS_WPG group is not an option. Also a dedicated app pool user account is generally a good idea. If the AD user password is changed, you'll bring your app to its knees until you again re-enter the credentials in the IIS Manager.

Edit: I added some para breaks to make this chunk more readable.

Answer 2

I had this same problem and I resolved it by starting the application pool. Ours was stopped even though IIS was running.