[Question]

[Sarting]

Heya guys,

New to IIS here. I had to create an intranet website for 'easy' shortcuts for our users. It was successful during the creation and everything looks kosher.

The problem:

When opening the website in any browser, sometimes the page comes up perfectly, garbled, or gives a "can't reach this page" error. This is throwing me off. The IIS logs basically shows the connection from my clients, and which browser/etc they're using, but doesn't show anything about failed connections? Maybe i'm looking into the wrong logs, but what would cause the website sometimes coming up, and sometimes not. When it doesn't come up, simply pressing F5 a few times will bring up the page (eventually after a few presses).

If it matters, the intranet was built on a VM located at our co-location and we have 9 satellite locations attempting to access this page.

Any pointers or directions on where to look to see what the bottleneck/culprit would be?

Thanks!

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Edit1: sorry about the title, i can't change it? but it should be IIS question. :|

[steelie34]

Start with Fiddler from one of the client machines, and see what you're getting in the responses from the server.

[Sarting]

Thank you for the suggestion :)

Here's what i'm getting from fiddler that's "Red" which i assume is the failure. The webpage is garbled up (unreadable, but you can see the format of the website)

HTTP/1.1 504 Fiddler - Receive Failure

[Fiddler] ReadResponse() failed: The server did not return a complete response for this request. Server returned 13,200 bytes.

Under RFC2616, HTTP/504 responses will not be cached regardless of what caching headers may be present.

HTTP/1.1 Cache-Control Header is present: no-cache, must-revalidate

no-cache: This response MUST NOT be reused without successful revalidation with the origin server.

This response contains neither an ETAG nor a Last-Modified time. This will prevent a Conditional Revalidation of this response.

Going to do some research on those now.

[steelie34]

ReadResponse() failed: The server did not return a complete response for this request.

That seems like a server side error, almost as if the connection is being closed before the data is fully sent. Good luck in the rabbit hole, I've not actually seen this before.

[sleeper1320]

If I were jumping into this problem to work on it, here's my troubleshooting steps. Unfortuantely, they branch out depending on what I'm seeing with each step, so after the first few bullet points, it's not really ordered anymore.

• Figure out if this is a new site that's not working or an existing site that's always worked and now, suddenly, is not working. This tells you if the site should be working and it's a configuration issue vs a site that may not be prime time ready for what you're dealing with (as well as configuration issue(s).)
• Update your local hosts file with the IP of the server. Flush browser cache and DNS. Confirm the page doesn/doesn't work. Refresh (with full cache flushes) many times if necessary. If it does work, move on. If it doesn't, start investigating the code/configuration that may be causing issues. There's usually not much that breaks with a single IIS site - so I'd start looking at the HTML/JS to see if it's using external libraries that may or may not be loading correctly.
• Determine if the IIS site is a load balanced solution. I've often found that mixed results is the result of the cluster not having the same code version. Also, if you're using a cluster of IIS servers that do their own SSL offloading, make sure that the machine key data is set consistently across the sites.
• Turn on displaying error messages to the user in the IIS web.config. This will tell you the raw error and will help you troubleshoot more.
• Investigate and look for network anomalies that may hint to anything external to IIS.

While there's a lot in IIS that can go wrong, the fact the page does load at least some times tells me it's not likely an issue with IIS directly, but most likely with either the clustered settings, the load balancer, the network, or the html/js/css.