Visual Studio 2012 Web Deploy to Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS 7 and /msdeploy.axd 404 error

Question

In Visual Studio 2012 RC when I try to validate a Web Deploy connection I get this error message:

ERROR_DESTINATION_NOT_REACHABLE

The required Web Management Service is started on the server and Web Deploy 3.0 RC is installed.

Then using Remote Desktop Connection I log on the server and go check IIS logs located at C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1. There I can see my attempts to validate the connection because they contain my IP address:

2012-07-13 20:58:49 185.201.117.17 HEAD /msdeploy.axd site=Default%20Web%20Site 8172 - 189.10.32.194 - 404 0 2 78 

It's giving me a 404.

After trying to get this working for almost 6 hours now (reading a lot of material including this great Troubleshooting guide by IIS team titled Troubleshooting Web Deploy problems with Visual Studio and this related question Visual Studio 2010 Web deployment task failed) I decided to ask for help here and see if anyone has a clue about what can be the problem... Do you know what's causing this 404 error?

If you need any more info, just ask me and I'll provide it... :)

Edit 1

Yesterday I also tried the following msdeploy command on my local machine to list the the contents of a folder called test on the server [ and it worked as expected ]:

C:\Program Files\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy V3>msdeploy -verb:dump -source:content path=c:\test,computerName=xxxxxxxxxx.publiccloud.com.br,username=User,password=Password Info: Using ID 'a246a13c-7777-4226-964c-fe9934c60b77' for connections to the rem ote server. MSDeploy.contentPath c:\test c:\test c:\test\test.txt 

Edit 2

After a lot of install/reinstall operations I finally got to a point where Windows Server 2008 is returning a 503 HTTP error when I try to publish the web site using VS 2012 RC or even msdeploy in the command line.

Looks like the best thing to do now is to do a clean install of Windows Server 2008 since I got a messed up VM server image to work with. Hope it'll do the trick.

Just for the record, this is the msdeploy command VS 2012 tries to execute. I did a copy/paste and tried it with msdeploy in the command line:

C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy V3\msdeploy.exe -source:manifest='E:\SISPEC\SISPEC\obj\Release\Package\SISPEC.SourceManifest.xml' -dest:auto,ComputerName="https://xxxxxxxxxx.publiccloud.com.br:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=Default%20Web%20Site",UserName='UserName',Password='Password',IncludeAcls='False',AuthType='Basic' -verb:sync -enableRule:DoNotDeleteRule -disableLink:AppPoolExtension -disableLink:ContentExtension -disableLink:CertificateExtension -setParamFile:"E:\SISPEC\SISPEC\obj\Release\Package\SISPEC.Publish.Parameters.xml" -retryAttempts=2 

just to get the same 503 Server Unavailable message.

Edit 3

This question was cross-posted at the IIS Web Deployment Tool (MS Deploy) forum here.

Answer 1

Fyi - I too was getting the 404 errors. It turned out that I had to download the full package and install everything.

http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/web-deploy#additionalDownloads

Answer 2

I had this same error (ERROR_DESTINATION_NOT_REACHABLE). I was able to fix the issue by opening port 8172.

I then ran into the error: ERR_COULD_NOT_CONNECT_TO_REMOVESVC which I was able to resolve by installing every component of Web Deploy 3.0. It was trying to hit /MSDEPLOYAGENTSERVICE which by default isn't installed by the Web Deploy 3.0 installer.