Setting up a Mercurial server on IIS 6

Question

I've set up a Mercurial server on a Windows 2003 / IIS 6 machine and when I try to pull the repository I get the following sequence

requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
transaction abort!
rollback completed
abort: premature EOF reading chunk (got 91303 bytes, expected 1542634)

I've tried pretty much everything I can think of, but with no success. I followed the steps of Jeremy Skinners guide on doing it for IIS7, but on an IIS6 server.

I found a post where the author was experiencing the same issue, but was unable to find a solution.

So far it looks like the solution is to migrate to Apache or upgrade to Windows 2008/II7 .. but if someone knows how to solve this, please let me know

Answer 1

I'll answer this one myself.

The problem turned out to be that there is a CGI script timeout of 5 minutes in IIS 6 (and below, not sure about 7) and this was what kept being hit. To change the timeout value you have to have the IIS 6 Resource Kit installed.

Once installed, start the MetaBase Explorer utility and navigate to \LM\W3SVC and locate the CGITimeout entry and change the value from the default 300 (5 minutes) to a higher value (I ended up using 20 minutes).

After changing the value I restarted IIS to make sure it was used by the server. Once this has been done, everything worked like a charm!

Cross posted on my blog

Answer 2

I haven't tried it yet, but there's this: Running Mercurial on Windows

If you scroll down to the "Windows Server 2003/XP" section, I think that should cover you for IIS 6.