I was having a hell of a time tonight with my IIS on my development laptop. I don’t remember doing anything to change the IIS settings. I don’t use IIS that much on my dev machine. Usually Cassini is enough for testing my development efforts but tonight I needed to replicate a problem that seems to stem from x86 v x64 mismatch, so I went to create an IIS site pointed to my dev folder.

When I did, I got a “503.1 Service Unavailable Error”.

First thing I did is go over all my setting to make sure I didn’t screw something up when I set up the site. It was pointing to the right place, and the app pool settings seemed to be alright. However, when I got the 503.1 error and went back to my app pool list, I saw that the app pool I was using was stopped again. I must’ve started and ran it a dozen times to verify that I wasn’t seeing things. After having a colleague look at it and not finding an answer, I started poking around Google. I cam across a post from Phil Haack about the same error. His fix was not mine, however. When I ran his command on the CLI, I didn’t see the reserved routes for HTTP.SYS there.

Finally, I looked in the event viewer (where I should have looked as soon as I saw that my app pool was stopping) and saw an error in there. For the IIS-W3SVC-WP Source I saw:

The worker process for application pool 'DefaultAppPool' encountered an error 'Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions

' trying to read configuration data from file '\\?\C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\CONFIG\machine.config', line number '0'. The data field contains the error code.

So I went to that path and saw a little lock on the file icon. I opened up the security tab for file properties and saw that I was missing the IIS_IUSRS group. On a machine that was working correctly, I verified that it indeed had the IIS_IUSRS group set to Read and Read & Execute allowed. So I set mine up the same and voila!

Hopefully this helps somebody else, too.

Jack Dawson

Jack Dawson is the homeless drifter in Titanic. At one point in the movie he says, “I figure life’s a gift, and I don’t intend on wasting it.” He is happy to wander wherever life takes him. He works himself from place to place, making just enough money to make it to his next adventure.

The “Jack Dawson” developer clings on to any new technology as the ‘next big thing’, and will find ways to shoe-horn it in to places where it is not a fit. He is very appealing to the other developers because they want to try the newest techniques and tools too, He will only stay until the new technology either bores him or becomes problematic. Jack will also be hard to find once the technology has been implemented, because he will be on to the next shiny thing.

However, having a Jack Dawson on your team can be beneficial. Jack can be a great ally when attempting to convince a stodgy, corporate entity to upgrade. Jack usually has an encyclopedic recall of all the new features of the technology upgrade and is more than happy to interject them in any conversation.

Tom Smykowski

Tom is the neurotic employee in Office Space, and is deathly afraid of being fired. He will do only what is necessary to keep the status quo. He believes as long as nothing changes, his job is safe. He will scoff at anything new and be the naysayer during any change initiative.

Tom can be useful in off-setting Jack Dawson. Jack will constantly be pushing for change and Tom will constantly be fighting it. When you see that Jack is getting kind of bored with a new technology and Tom has finally stopped wetting himself at the mere mention of it, then it is probably the sweet spot of beginning to implement that new technology (providing it is the right tool for the job).

Ray Consella

Ray is the guy who built the Field of Dreams. He took a risk. Sometimes he screwed it up, but he knew he didn’t want to end up regretting not attempting it. He constantly doubted himself, but he knew he had to keep going. Granted, he was doing what the voices in his head were telling him to do, but my point is he was driven to do something that most people considered crazy. Even when his friends, his wife and even he told himself he was crazy, somewhere inside himself, he knew it was the right thing to do.

These are the innovators. These are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world. The take risks, they fail, they learn and the get better. Obviously, this kind of person thrives in start-ups and smaller companies, but that is due to their natural aversion to bureaucracy. They want to see their ideas put into motion quickly, and withdrawn quickly if it doesn’t work. Short feedback cycles are essential to Ray. He wants to know if his idea is working or not. He wants to modify or reverse his idea if it is not working or makes things worse.

These are the agilistas. May I always be one.

I’ve been absent from blogging for awhile. Part of it is due to the ultimate inertia of my life. Most of it is due to my inability to post my thoughts without turning it into an ‘According to Hoyle’ blog post. I have an idea, and I try to flesh it into an interesting article. Something that you might see posted in a magazine or something. It never lives up to my standards and I end up dropping it. How did I get to this? I started this blog for the intended purpose of archiving my ideas and solutions so that I could find them again. Me. I realize that maybe some people read this blog, but I am NOT a celebrity or God’s gift to programming. So why am I worried about making my posts ‘worthy of public consumption’?

Well, no more. If you are a reader of this blog, I thank you. But my content may change dramatically over the coming months, so be prepared. Hopefully you will still find my thoughts, ideas and solutions worth reading.

Thanks again,

Lee