"network location cannot be reached" error in IIS6.

Question

I am troubleshooting an issue with IIS6 where all sites bound to ip addresses other than the default give an error message "network location cannot be reached" when trying to start any of these sites.

The nic has all the ip addresses configured. When I do a httpcfg query iplisten, I see only the default ip address. When I added them with httpcfg, then all the web sites stopped working so I figured I didn something wrong so I removed them.

Two questions: 1- Why are those websites refusing to start? 2- What should be in the result of httpcfg query iplisten? All ip addresses or just one?

The websites used to work fine and something has changed. I applied a few Windows updates but I am not sure if they broke anything (I doubt it.. otherwise hundreds of web hosting companies would be screaming)

Answer 1

Sometimes there are bugs wehn applying windows updates. One thing you might try is running aspnet_regiis /i or /c. I'm not sure if that's your problem but it's certainly worth a shot.

Answer 2

That message generally comes from Windows networking (it's one of ERROR_NETWORK_UNREACHABLE, ERROR_HOST_UNREACHABLE, ERROR_PROTOCOL_UNREACHABLE - you can search for error messages in WinError.h).

Have you set up virtual directories to point at network shares on another machine? If so, check connectivity to that machine.

Answer 3

The solution was to use httpcfg without specifying the port number.