Monkeedude1212's Journal: The little things

As everyone in IT knows, the bulk of the workload is not actually doing operations, but rather fixing things or getting them to function properly. This makes it more of an annoying job, specifically when you can't figure it out for a while.

So I get pulled aside to help set up a server for someone at work. Somehow, as the junior guy, I have the most experience with IIS and web sites. Given there are only 3 other IT workers in the company, and each of them kind of have their expertise, its not TOO surprising. Anyways, so he's trying to browse to a virtual directory he set up or some such, and its giving him a 404. So I get called over. He says I can sit down if I want, call him when I get it figured out. Great, so I have no idea what he has done to set it up so far, and any troubleshooting he might have tried. Check the paths - they all look good. Okay so its pointing to a default.aspx - it exists and is in the right spot. Won't open in Internet explorer for some reason. That alone seemed curious enough. I tried pointing it to a test.html file. Worked like a charm. So ASP.NET isn't going for some reason. I'm told Its a fresh install of Server 2003. Maybe it doesn't have the latest .NET framework, its a long shot, but I go grab it from windows update. Still doesn't work.

Thank God for Google, I was getting a little frustrated at this point. Turns out someone had this problem (99% of the time Google will have someone complaining about the same problem). And it turns out they found the solution. Windows Server 2003 doesn't allow ASP extensions by default. This absolutely baffles me. the .NET framework practically -IS- microsoft, and they have it prohibited by default on their servers. What benefit does this serve?