From: Big Daddy on
When I open a web browser pointing to anything in this web server, the
web page just says: "Service unavailable". The OS is Windows 2003
SP2. Even if there's a simple html page in the root IIS folder, it
can't display it. I have looked around the internet and tried a few
different things:

- Many people suggest that I can change the IIS configuration to use
IIS 5.0 Isolation Mode. This works for me, but I don't want to switch
to IIS 5.0 Isolation Mode. I think IIS should be able to work without
this.

- Some people suggest that some of the files for Windows Server
Service Pack 2 might not be installed correctly. So I ran a script
suggested at this link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webtopics/archive/2009/12/18/sample-script-to-verify-iis-file-versions-for-kb973917.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

But that wasn't the problem since all my files are up-to-date.

- I looked in the event log and couldn't find any error messages
relating to IIS. It doesn't seem like IIS is writing logs to the C:
\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC1 folder even though logging is
enabled.

Any ideas?

thanks in advance,
John
From: Ken Schaefer on
Hi,

503 Service Unavailable is returned by http.sys - it has it's own log
(httperr.log). Check in there to see if that gives you any clues.

also, look again in the Windows Event Log (not the IIS one). Just in case
IIS is crashing - there will be events logged, If IIS services can't start
at all, the events will be logged when the machine is started, not when you
are trying to access the webpages.

Cheers
Ken

http://adOpenStatic.com/blog

"Big Daddy" <johngilmer(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f38665fe-c003-4941-85db-47007ed7a1bf(a)v41g2000yqv.googlegroups.com...
> When I open a web browser pointing to anything in this web server, the
> web page just says: "Service unavailable". The OS is Windows 2003
> SP2. Even if there's a simple html page in the root IIS folder, it
> can't display it. I have looked around the internet and tried a few
> different things:
>
> - Many people suggest that I can change the IIS configuration to use
> IIS 5.0 Isolation Mode. This works for me, but I don't want to switch
> to IIS 5.0 Isolation Mode. I think IIS should be able to work without
> this.
>
> - Some people suggest that some of the files for Windows Server
> Service Pack 2 might not be installed correctly. So I ran a script
> suggested at this link:
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webtopics/archive/2009/12/18/sample-script-to-verify-iis-file-versions-for-kb973917.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0
>
> But that wasn't the problem since all my files are up-to-date.
>
> - I looked in the event log and couldn't find any error messages
> relating to IIS. It doesn't seem like IIS is writing logs to the C:
> \WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC1 folder even though logging is
> enabled.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> thanks in advance,
> John

From: John and Kim on
On Aug 9, 5:49 am, "Ken Schaefer" <kenREM...(a)THISadOpenStatic.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 503 Service Unavailable is returned by http.sys - it has it's own log
> (httperr.log). Check in there to see if that gives you any clues.
>
> also, look again in the Windows Event Log (not the IIS one). Just in case
> IIS is crashing - there will be events logged, If IIS services can't start
> at all, the events will be logged when the machine is started, not when you
> are trying to access the webpages.
>
> Cheers
> Ken

I found the file httperr1.log and it led me to the fix. The entries
in it said "Disabled DefaultAppPool". For some reason the
DefaultAppPool was not started, and starting it fixed the issue.
thanks a ton!