February 12, 201412 yr As a hobbyist my setup is rather basic, and my knowledge of how to configure it is even more basic. I am using IIS7 for my localhost on a win 7 ultimate 64 laptop. Last night as i logged off microsoft updates automatically installed. This evening before I logged in the updates finished installing and then rebooted my laptop. When I went to use my localhost all I could get was the Server '\' Application error 401.2 access denied. I have been in touch with Microsoft support and they led my round a merry chase but solved nothing. They are telling me to call a premium rate phone number for specialist support with IIS configuration. Having checked the update history, within this batch of updates there were 5 .net framework security updates and I believe that it is one or more of these that is causing my problem. Microsoft support just disconnected the service rather than look into this issue properly and gave me no help what so ever, (which I will blog about later). They didn't even put things back as they found them and it took me ages to get my laptop to reboot properly! My problem is that with so little knowledge of the IIS configuration I can't get my localhost working again and thus cannot do anything with my websites I 'play with' for my hobby. Can anybody help me with this configuration issue please, speaking in layman's terms will be essential.
February 13, 201412 yr Author I have never been a quitter and today sat down with all my notes from when I first set the IIS up going through all the configurations. IIS is bad because you can configure almost every aspect of the server for each individual directory it has access too. Can be useful for a live hosting service, but I wouldn't think to many of them use IIS in it's original public release form for that job. Anyway long story short, I found in no less than 14 locations that the application pools had all been set to block 32 bit applications. Dum thing to do when the IIS manager uses a 32 bit configuration as far as I can see. At the moment things seem to be working, but this is yet another occasion where Microsofts 3rd party support people just wanted to make money for putting right Microsofts careless and basically stupid errors. So if anybody else has issues like this, ie the access denied page is displayed after a Microsoft update, go straight to the application pool 'Advanced settings' and check for 'Allow 32 bit applications: false'
February 14, 201412 yr Author I think the best way forwards is to ditch IIS and install WAMP to be honest I tried that before, but you know good old Microsoft and their uninstallers. Never did manage to get any apache download to work with Mysql or MongoDb. When I eventually gave up it took a couple of day's to clear it all back out so I could use IIS again. That's the trouble with this being my hobby, I started with what was there, found out too late I was off to a bad start trusting Microsoft's solutions, and thanks to Microsoft there's little hope of redeeming the situation until I next upgrade my laptop. (Maybe later this year I'll get a linux laptop).
February 14, 201412 yr Author Reformat with Ubuntu Brilliant bit of kit! Or go Mac like I did. I certainly won't go back to Windoze in a hurry. My laptop is almost 4 years old anyway, so I want to get a new one. This old one will good for er.. somethings I am sure. But reformatting it is an option once I have my new laptop.
February 14, 201412 yr Author Windows 8 Why would anybody want to burden themselves with that? And yes very true, a Ubuntu install would be significantly more efficient for just about everything. I just need to keep my windows files for now until I can be 100% certain I will loose nothing for people like the dreaded tax man.
May 7, 201511 yr Reformat with Ubuntu Brilliant bit of kit! Or go Mac like I did. I certainly won't go back to Windoze in a hurry. +1 for this . Go with ubuntu and forget everything. After installing ubun. use the apt-get command to install apache + php + mysql.
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