IIS 7 hosted sites not accessible from remote machines
Recently while working on my Vista machine, I was was working on a ASP.NET Web site and I wanted to have a colleage of mine have a look. Like always, I mailed him the URL and waited for him to view it and get back. To my surprise, he reverted stating he can't view it.
The error he was getting was "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage". This was surprising since I was able to view the site locally on the Vista machine without any issues. This meant that IIS was configured and running properly.
I tried to figure out the reason for this strange behavior since the IIS and world wide web services were all running properly on the machine. Turns out, it isn't really strange after all. It is one of those things done to make your machine more secure. To get this working, you need alter the default Firewall settings.
Run the Windows Firewall Settings Wizard (firewall.cpl) and in the Exceptions tab, scroll down and enable "World Wide Web services (HTTP)" option, as shown in the figure below. You will now be able to access the site properly. There is Support KB also on this, which I later found out.
Comments
Good info. Had the same problem. I am now able to browse my ASP.NET application from other computers within my own network. How do I enable IIS/Vista to allow other Internet users to access my application?
I guess/realize I/they need to know my IP address. (How do I obtain that btw?). Are there any other Vista Firewall settings I need to change/alter?
Posted by: Peter | April 2, 2007 06:28 PM
Really very good and important information regarding setting for IIS 7 and firwall restriciton.
Posted by: Ashish Thakare | April 3, 2007 06:37 AM
Peter, if the PC is an official network, then they will typically not be directly exposed to the net as per corporate policies. If this is your home PC, then using the same wizard as above can help. Change the settings in the General Tab. However you need to ensure then that your PC is protected against hackers and also will need a static IP. on command prompt you can type ipconfig to get the current IP address details. Your service provider can give you a static IP
Posted by: Atul Gupta | April 3, 2007 06:41 AM
Thanx a lot, I was getting mad, cos did not know whats going on with my website. :)
Posted by: Mau | April 4, 2008 06:47 AM
Thanks, this fixed my issue as well. A million small things that can cause you an issue and only one bit needs to be flipped to make it work. Windows Firewall in Vista was Blocking Intranet Traffic to my IIS Server. Once I unblocked HTTP above, it worked fine, It's a shame that you can unblock a lot of things in Windows Firewall to All PCs, and just Intranet PC, this one seemed to require all or nothing.
Posted by: I. Erickson | April 14, 2008 06:15 AM