File downloads from IIS 6.0
So we've moved 8 websites from Win2k to Win2k3. Some things have gone smoothly, some things have made me want to become a Buddhist monk (which actually wouldn't be that tough since I train in kung fu at a Buddhist temple here in Manhattan). One of the latter was enabling file downloads from the website. Basically, our client has a desktop app that needs to download updates from the website. We have a web service that lists the latest updates and their location and the app is responsible for everything else. Simple yet effective.
So after the switch, the app stopped working for both Mac and PC users. It turns out that Mac users need to download a .DMG file (which apparently is a mac-specific file format that is used all the time) and the Windows version needs to download both .EXE and .DLL files (and a few other types of files, but everything else went pretty smoothly). None of these were working.
The .DMG files we could get to download by opening up the website in the IIS snap in and looking for the MIME type applet and adding .DMG files with the right MIME type. I don't recall off the top of my head what that MIME type was, but you can find it on Google (although the Bush administration will eventually have access to that information). The .DLL and .EXE files were a little tricker. I had to switch the "Execute Permissions" from "Scripts and Executables" to "Scripts only."
For whatever reason, IIS 5 was like Washington Square Park (*) ... you can get anything at any time provided you know where to look. IIS 6 is much more secure, and you have to take steps to explicitly enable certain activities. That's fine and it makes sense. Fortunately there are a number of good bloggers from Microsoft, otherwise this issue would have been much tougher to track down, since the only place I found it talked about was on a blog or two. This tells me three things:
1 -- books are nice, but typically come out too late to be much help for most of us
2 -- keep blogging, everyone! It's a big help to all of us!
3 -- does anyone ever go to MSDN.com any more? It's about as useless as MSN.com. I feel like I'm being sold things rather than being allowed to look up something that's going to help me with my job. I always check MSDN when I've got a problem, but it's literally been years since it was actually useful.
(*) - For those of you who are not old skool New Yorkers, or who are New Yorkers but don't have as many shady friends as I do, Washington Square Park is a park down in Greenwich Village near NYU. It's long been The Place To Go when you're looking for less-than-legal pharmaceuticals. Some days, it reminds me of the old rave scene where it's just a marketplace for drugs of all kinds. These days, there are more police officers patrolling the area so it's not as scruffy as it used to be, but you'll still see people loitering in the evenings saying "smoke, smoke" under their breath. I happen to work 2 blocks away from the park, and one of my friends lives 2 blocks in the other direction, so I've walked through the park many times at all hours of the night.