Precompiled .NET app receiving "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"

Question

We have a web server that is running many web applications. When I took over this server, I noticed that the sites were not precompiled, so in an effort to clean it up, I precompiled the site using the Publish option in VS2008 (and allow the precompiled site to be updatable).

When I deployed the site to the web server, the site stopped working - In IE, I get "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" - in firefox I get "Unable to connect. Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at >>sub.domain.com<<". Here are a few things I've noticed:

• I am able to manually browse to the one static .html file that is part of the site
• If I replace the precompiled files on the server with uncompiled code, the site works fine
• If I switch the application pool to use .NET 4.0, I get errors with duplicate system.web.extensions module, which I would expect to see with an application built for .NET 3.5.
• When I initially browse to the site after a fresh IISRESET, the app redirects to /Login.aspx, which the web.config defines as the forms auth login page. It then redirects to /default.aspx and displays the error in question.
• CustomErrors is OFF, debugging is ENABLED, and yet I don't get a helpful .NET error page, and I see no System or Application-level events in the Windows event log.

Any hints as to why this might be happening? I was able to successfully precompile another site on the same server with ZERO problems.

Answer 1

My first guess is that this is something to do with the account being used by the application pool & permissions. Are there any security errors being reported in the event log?

Answer 2

I found the problem myself. The login page was redirecting to HTTPS if the host header wasn't localhost. I noticed that in the uncompiled site, someone manually went into the .VB file for the login page and added the specific domain for the beta site into this check, preventing the redirect to HTTPS. I copied the code into my local, recompiled, and deployed, and now the site works as expected.