WCF / SSL Issue: The requested service, 'https://my.url/myService.svc' could not be activated. See the server's diagnostic trace logs for more information.

Question

Hey All,

I'm trying to reproduce a production system locally but I having issues using the services. I have set up the local instance of the server as close as I can to the production server but my local client will not work with it. However the same client on my local machine works fine with the production instance.

In order to use the production system locally, I have used the hosts file to redirect all the addresses involved to 127.0.0.1 and host headers are used in IIS.

The only difference that I'm aware of on my local machine is that rather than using an SSL cert that was purchased from a CA, I am using one that I created with SelfSSL from the IIS resource kit. I used the following command to create the certificate:

selfssl.exe /T /N:CN=my.url /V:365 /S:12345 /P:443 (where 12345 is the ID of my website in IIS)

Whenever I try to use/debug the client locally I get the error:

"The requested service, 'https://my.url/myService.svc' could not be activated. See the server's diagnostic trace logs for more information."

I have tried accessing the service with the following URLs in a browser: https://my.url/myService.svc?wsdl http://my.url/myService.svc?wsdl and in both cases it returned the wsdl XML.

Can anyone help me resolve this problem?

Cheers,

Stef

Answer 1

Make sure your IIS settings is ASP.NET 2.0 and not 1.0 or 1.1.

Answer 2

Solved!!... it was a permissions issue on the private key in the cert. The ASPNET user needed permissions and I granted them using winhttpcertcfg:

winhttpcertcfg -g -c LOCAL_MACHINE\My -s my.url -a ASPNET