I am having this weird issue with IIS 7.5 on Windows 2008 R2 x64. I created a site in IIS and manually created a test file index.html and everything worked. When I try to do a deployment, I copy all the files from my local PC to the IIS server, try to access index.html (this is the proper deployed file) and getting 401.3 access denied error. I then try to manually recreate index.html and copy content into this newly created file and the page is accessible again… I just can't figure this out. So the issue is that IIS 7.5 can't server files that have been copied from other PCs. I tried to reset/apply permission settings to the copied folders/files but nothing has worked. Please help. Thanks! By the way, the files that I copied are just some html cutups i.e. generic html, css and image files, nothing special.
IIS 7.5 401.3 Access Denied
iis-7.5permissionswindows-server-2008
Best Answer
Sounds like a file permission issue to me. Make sure that you are indeed copying files into the wwwroot folder and not moving them from another folder. When you copy the files they will automatically inherit the permissions from the parent folder, but if you move files they will retain their original permissions. I would recommend first copying the files to a folder on the computer and then copying them from there into the wwwroot folder.
Another thing to try would be to zip the files before copying them to the computer and then extract them to the local drive before copying them into the wwwroot folder.