IIS7 MVC Routing Not Working

Question

Our company ships an MVC based product (targeting v4.5) which has stopped working on a customer site for what appear to be environmental issues - a build which worked with no problems once upon a time now gives a 403.14 - The Web server is configured to not list the contents of this directory. .

What I think is happening...

• The user accesses http://server/AppName
• Because it's an MVC app, the default route (Reports/Index) should be used.
• Instead IIS is looking for a default document...
• ... and, not finding one, it assumes the user wants to list the contents of the directory...
• ...which is not enabled so it throws a 403.14. .

What I've tried so far...

• Accessing the route directly.. results in 404 error. So I'm pretty sure IIS doesn't realise it should use routing.
• Use aspnet_regiis to register ASP.Net with IIS. This was done from the Framework64 folder since...
  • OS is 64 bit - Windows Server 2008 (Standard without Hyper-V)
  • IIS is 64 bit - though Enable 32-Bit Applications is true
• Checked AppPool is targeting v4 of the framework - it is.
• Changed AppPool mode to Classic - was pretty sure it should be integrated but was worth ruling it out. It is now back to Integrated
• Confirmed RunAllManagedModulesForAllRequests is set to true in the web.config.
• Checked permission conditions defined in <system.webServer> section of web.config are met - they are.
• Created the simplest of MVC applications and deployed it - same problem.
• Running the command shell as Administrator unregistered ASP.Net using aspnet_regiis -ua and re-registered using aspnet_regiis -enable -i. We hit a couple of permission problems - and the Temporary ASP.NET Files directory was missing but once they were address we were back to the same error.
• Added a simple default.htm - when present, this is served in response to the http://server/AppName request.

I'm clean out of ideas and all google hits suggest some combination of the above - or enabling directory browsing (which I think is just a symptom rather than the root cause).

Also, not sure if it's relevant but the amount of configurable elements available for the application in IIS seems a bit below what I would have expected...

Answer 1

Have you Checked the user the application pool process is running under? I think Your site needs to run with permissions to execute the .net libraries and I've seen this just change for seemingly no reason (probably related to an overzealous update to the system).