Isaac Whatever

I'm making this up.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

IIS 5 to IIS 6 write permissions account change

I had an interesting issue at work today. We have some continuous integration automation that sets up daily install machines. The machines are different flavors of windows, from 2k to XP to 2k3. Part of our setup process was failing with the following error on an IIS6 box:

Access to the path "C:\our path" is denied.

Our permissions were setup exactly the same on both boxes. The ASP.NET account had full effective permissions to this file at this point in the setup process, and that worked on the IIS5 box.

But not on IIS6.

After some Google-Fu, I found the following forum post at dev.communityserver.com:

To eliminate this bug for me, I gave full control to IIS_WPG worker process account."

" * For IIS 5
o Give the ASPNET account this access.
* For IIS 6
o Give the application pool identity account (usually NETWORK SERVICE) this access."

This worked perfectly. Thank you Bill Bosacker.

To Recap-
The Error:
Access to the path "C:\our path" is denied.
The Question:
What has changed between IIS5 and IIS6 that would cause this permission issue?
The Fix:
Give permissions to IIS_WPG.

Labels: Access to the path is denied, bug, error, iis, iis5, iis6, permissions, tech, troubleshooting