What's the best machine for development?

ASP Pages not displaying on development machine - IIS, Win 2000 Pro

• Running IIS 5 on Win 2000 Pro machine - only for development purposes, not for live production. I have never been able to get .ASP pages to display on my machine - I continually get a 404 error. (They will work fine if I upload them to my webhost's machine - therefore isolating the problem to my machine). I can view HTML pages just fine. For example, if I use the browser to visit http://mymachine/testweb/plain.htm, it will come up just fine. If I try http://mymachine/testweb/test.asp, I will get a 404 error (I know the file is there and I have not typed it incorrectly). If I browse to the .ASP page in IE and try to open it, it will launch Front Page 2002. I'm not sure if this matters, but I did also create a virtual directory and point it to the directory containing the test.asp page. I am assuming that I have IIS installed correctly, but I really don't know for sure. I never play around with that type of part of my computer - I'm one of those folks that if it works, don't touch it. My only problem seems to be the ASP pages. I have a huge pile of other websites in my Inetput/wwwroot directory, so I want to pretty careful to make sure that I don't hurt anything with my other files. I read last night on some IIS newsgroups about the Application Mappings. I'm wondering if that might be part of the issue. I noticed that everything listed was going to 404.dll. I changed ASP, CER, CDX and ASA to point to ASP.DLL. The directory that the test.asp file is in has Read and Scripts permissions. I have never been able to get .ASP files to work on my machine. A while back I installed "IIS Lockdown" as recommended by Microsoft Security Website. However, the ASP pages did not work before this either. I would be happy to try and provide any additional information and would greatly appreciate an answer. I am quite a novice at this part of Win 2K, so hand holding would be great. Thanks for any help you can offer. I will be at my PC most of the day, so if you need clarification, I should be pretty quick in responding. Best regards, WebDesignGuy

• Answer:

  Greetings webdesignguy, Regarding your question about your ASP pages not working from IIS5, based on our troubleshooting sessions included in the comments section of this question, it looks like the best solution to your problem is going to be a uninstall/reinstall of the IIS5 application. We determined that at least one of the tabs in the IIS configuration having to do with ASP is completely missing and for some reason your application mappings were app pointing to invalid dll files. I'm not sure how those settings got that way, but trying to manually correct them proved to be fruitless. To me, it looks like either the application wasn't installed properly or completely the first time around. I recommend a complete uninstall/reinstall of IIS5, backing up all of the websites included (including the metabase). Hopefully this will correct the issue by reloading all of the IIS/ASP dll and content files. If this does not correct the issue, a deeper problem exists, most likely within the registry or within the Windows 2000 structure. A fresh install of Windows 2000 + IIS5 may be the only way to correct the issue at that point. I wish we could have come up with a fast and easy way to get your ASP pages working correctly, but IIS is a fairly complex application that spans deep into the Windows 2000 system. I was happy to work with you on this issue and will be happy to provide you with additional help if necessary. Just "Ask for Clarification" if I can be of further assistance. Good luck with your websites! Sincerely, PWizard