Thursday, October 05, 2006

Windows 2003 web server returns 503 Service Unavailable

Yes, lots of problems today ... but at least they're all easy to fix.

After setting up my new web sites I was getting a "Service Unavailable" response from the server. Turns out that once you create the sites you have to start the application pool associated with those sites. It's a fairly minor additional step, but it'd be nice if starting a site would start the associated application pool (or at least remind you to do so).

Oh, and don't forget to create/turn on the appropriate entries in the Web Service Extensions folder as well (such as for the asp processor).