IIS 6.0 / 2003 giving 404 error after period of time

Question

I have a local development server running Windows Server 2003 that hosts a few applications running on IIS 6.0. I can connect to these said applications just fine but after an unknown period of time they are unreachable, giving me 404 errors. I'm still able to ping the server when I get these 404 errors.

However, I have noticed if I run ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew on the client the connectivity issue becomes resolved.

Any thoughts on what might be happening here and how it can be resolved?

Update 1

When I'm having connection problems the IIS error log shows that the s-reason is Timer_ConnectionIdle.

Just out of curiosity.... did you assign a static IP address to this server? — JohnThePro, Mar 06 '12 at 19:13
What does netstat look like on the server before and after the /ipconfig /release and /renew ? — kls, Mar 08 '12 at 01:49
What happens on the server, can you use the locally installed version of IE to connect, rather than from a client? — Tubs, Mar 09 '12 at 10:02

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 28 '12 at 20:28

Hm, it's possible you did not enable to the correct web extensions which could explain it's intermittent working.

I'll link you to this article from technet: technet But the snippet I'd pay attention to is this;

IIS6 Dynamic Content: A 404.2 entry in the W3C Extended Log file is recorded when a Web Extension is not enabled. Use the IIS Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in to enable the appropriate Web extension. Default Web Extensions include: ASP, ASP.net, Server-Side Includes, WebDAV publishing, FrontPage Server Extensions, Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Custom extensions must be added and explicitly enabled. See the IIS 6.0 Help File for more information.

IIS6 Static Content: A 404.3 entry in the W3C Extended Log file is recorded when an extension is not mapped to a known extention in the MIME Map property. Use the IIS Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in to configure the appropriate extension in the MIME Map. See the IIS 6.0 Help file for more information.

So essentially, use your log files and try to narrow down the specific error. A 404 can be a lot of things and hard to solve without a more specific error tag.

In the log file, the `s-reason` was `Timer_ConnectionIdle` when I couldn't connect. — Bryan Roth, Mar 09 '12 at 17:01

IIS 6.0 / 2003 giving 404 error after period of time

1 Answers1