Allow special charcters in IIS request URLs

Question

Currently, when I try to hit certain pages of my site via something like http://www.domain.com/< (which is a valid URL), I get a blank page with the text "Bad Request" on it (and nothing else). This happens with both the escaped and unescaped version of the URL.

I'm fairly certain this is due to IIS6 not liking the < character (which, in general, is valid). Is there a way to stop IIS6 from filtering these characters and giving me this error page?

(I've found similar solutions for IIS7, but nothing has worked in IIS6 so far.)

UPDATE: The URL is being transformed already, ie. hitting domain.com/%3C will also give the "Bad Request" page.

Answer 1

RFC 1738:

Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.

< transforms to %3C

http://stackoverflow.com/<

Answer 2

Not sure if this will work, but this got me out of a similar jam caused by design types forgetting key parts of query strings. Sounds like you might have a similar issue. Anyhow, try making a virtual directory called %3c and then having that redirect to where appropriate.