"Failed to access IIS metabase" on XP

[David Veeneman]

I had to reformat my Windows XP Professional development machine yesterday
and reinstall everything, including IIS and VS 2005. I thought I had worked
out the procedure to get ASP.NET up and running on a local machine, but I am
getting this error when I try to open a web app on the local IIS
installation: "Failed to access IIS metabase".

Okay--the ASPNET account doesn't have access to the IIS metabase. I ran
aspnet_regiis with the -ga option on the ASPNET user account, as follows:

aspnet_regiis -ga ASPNET

The command executed fine, and returned success:

**********
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727>aspn et_regiis -ga ASPNET

Start granting ASPNET access to the IIS metabase and other directories used
by ASP.NET.

Finished granting ASPNET access to the IIS metabase and other directories
used by ASP.NET.

**********

So the ASPNET account now has metabase permissions. I ran iisreset.exe to
reset IIS, and reopened the web app-- and I got the same error.

Any idea what's going on here? How do I fix this problem?

[GregG]

"David Veeneman" <da****@nospam.com (domain is my last name)> said:

I had to reformat my Windows XP Professional development machine yesterday
and reinstall everything, including IIS and VS 2005. I thought I had worked
out the procedure to get ASP.NET up and running on a local machine, but I am
getting this error when I try to open a web app on the local IIS
installation: "Failed to access IIS metabase".

Reformatting seems a bit extreme...

But to try and answer your question,
You have to explicitly assign read rights to the directory for the
ASP.NET local machine user. This seems to occur primarily when the
site is a virtual directory not contained within the INETPUB folder.
ASP.NET also has to have access to the root of the site, so that it
can access global.asax.

FWIW,
Greg G.

[David Veeneman]

Had to reformat for another reason. I've assigned read rights for the IUSR
account, and read-write permissions for the ASPNET account. The error has to
do with the metabase, not NTFS.

[GregG]

"David Veeneman" <da****@nospam.com (domain is my last name)> said:

Had to reformat for another reason. I've assigned read rights for the IUSR
account, and read-write permissions for the ASPNET account. The error has to
do with the metabase, not NTFS.

Ah... that's what the error _says_. ;-)

We had the same problem.
Ran aspnet_regiis.exe, didn't help.
Explicity set permissions, and it worked on our 2003 server.

Have you tried:

aspnet_regiis.exe -ga aspnet

FWIW,
Greg G.

[David Veeneman]

Actually, I ended up using blunt force:

aspnet_regiis -i

That option sets the metabase permissions. not the most delicate way to get
the job done, but no harm in this case.

[GregG]

"David Veeneman" <da****@nospam.com (domain is my last name)> said:

Actually, I ended up using blunt force:

aspnet_regiis -i

That option sets the metabase permissions. not the most delicate way to get
the job done, but no harm in this case.

The -ga [user] option grants metabase authority to a supplied user.

The -i option re-integrates ASP.Net and updates the script-maps,
metabase root down. With Windows, whatever works! ;-)

FWIW,

Greg G.