DotNetNuke Upgrade

I've gotten a number of questions regarding the upgrade of DotNetNuke I did for our local .NET User Group. It seems that before I fixed the problem (which, in reality, isn't really fixed yet) Google got it's virtual hands on the error message and it's now a top search result for DotNetNuke upgrade problems. So I'll repeat here what I've told a few other folks.

First off, DNN 2.0 now includes support for Access as a database. Since 1.x was SQL-only, I was surprised to find that the default provider in web.config is Access. I say "surprised" because I didn't notice this until I had upgraded the site and once the disk was done churning, I was greeted with a new, empty DNN site! Since I was expecting to see my old site upgraded, my heart skipped a few beats as I wondered if DNN had ate my previous portal. It hadn't -- once I switched providers the database was properly upgraded. So, when upgrading from SQL, make sure you change the default provider in web.config to be SQL.

That led to my permission problem (see the cached version here). I could not figure out what was going on so I renamed "Default.aspx" to "dnn.aspx" and created a "Default.aspx" which was basically a page saying "Sorry, the site is down. We'll get it back up soon."

I was then going to open a helpdesk ticket with my host and point them to "dnn.aspx" so they could see the error message about setting permissions. Well, when I actually clicked on the link to dnn.aspx, it worked! So I though, "Odd -- must have been a temporary glitch". I deleted the "Default.aspx" and renamed "dnn.aspx" back to "Default.aspx", thus putting everything back the way it was. I go back to the root page and refresh. Guess what? Boom! Permission error again. Argh....

So I tried something I didn't think would work. I created a "Default.asp" (yes, ASP) and put in a simple Response.Redirect to Default.aspx -- and that seems to work (but not all the time!). This is just a hack and I don't think it should be used. Someone else from our user group said that the webhost won't change permissions on the whole directory (like DNN wants), but we can get the same effect through impersonation. I haven't tried it yet but it's on my to-do list.

2 Comments

  • No, that's not it since we were using 1.x previously without any problems (and it uses Default.aspx).

  • I'm having a bitch of a time figuring a similar issue out. For me, it has to do with permissions on the host. It works fine on my personal server. I'm going to try the renaming thing you mentioned above -- I'll try anything. Please continue to add your findings to this page. It will probably help someone.

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