IE : Unable to download * from *. Unable to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found.

Question

Hey,

I have an issue with my website and IE. I have a file Document.ashx that becomes a document from my database depending on the parameter passed in the query string.

The file works if:

• You're on my website and click a download link.
• You access anything on my site and paste the URL into the address bar and access it.
• You've already access the document link once before, even if it did error.

It doesn't work if:

• You've not accessed my site with the current IE open and paste the link in the address bar. It displays the following error:

Windows Internet Explorer

Unable to download Document.ashx from MyHostName.

Unable to open this Internet site.

The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found.

Please try again later.

Does anyone have a clue what would cause this. Naturally it works fine in Firefox.

I've gotten serveral people in my office to try it with IE and they all get the same issue. They all say it works in Firefox.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi there,

We had this same problem embedded in our ClickOnce deployment of www.Qiqqa.com. I suspect it has to do with the "MIME Type sniffing" that IE does when it gets an application/octet-stream - I guess to protect the user from malicious stuff.

Anyway, to solve the problem, we changed the mime type of our .deploy files to be text/plain - obviously not ideal, but at the same time, I don't know a scenario where we might have a .deploy file on our server that a user would browse to outside ClickOnce.

Problem solved.

Cheers,

Jimme