IIS6.0 - ASP.NET 4.0 - Default Content Page throwing Error message 401.2

Question

We have a .NET application that was recently converted to .NET 4.0 and then published to IIS 6.0. When we trying going to the url without a page www.blahblahblah.com we get the following error:

Server Error in '/' Application.

Access is denied. Description: An error occurred while accessing the resources required to serve this request. The server may not be configured for access to the requested URL.

Error message 401.2.: Unauthorized: Logon failed due to server configuration. Verify that you have permission to view this directory or page based on the credentials you supplied and the authentication methods enabled on the Web server. Contact the Web server's administrator for additional assistance.

We have IIS 6.0 site setup with a default content page going to "default.aspx". However, it seems IIS is not getting to the point of forwarding the url to this page. If we navigate directly to www.blahblahblah.com/default.aspx the page comes up with not issue and we all other functionality of the application works. If we roll back to the 3.5 version, the default page forwarding works as it should. Does anyone have any idea what is causing this?

Answer 1

I found the issue. Someone had put this (see below) in the authorization tag which prevented access to the website as a whole preventing IIS from forwarding to the default page, even though the page default.aspx had a location exception that allowed all users.

 <authorization>            
     <deny users="*"/>
 </authorization>