Recently, at work I was presented with an odd error. A newly imaged Virtual Machine with Windows Server 2008 R2 was showing blank pages when the customer was trying to access any HTML page. During our debug process we found that the machine showed the same source anytime we tried to access any files (images, HTML files, no extension HTML files, etc). That source is as follows:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-quiv=Content-Type></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>
After much contempt of Microsoft products, we determined that the access to static content was disabled.
How to Enable Static Content feature on Windows Server 2008:
- Open Server Manager, and then expand Roles.
- Right-click Web Server (IIS), and then click Add Role Services.
- Under Web Server, click to select the “Static Content” check box.
- Click Next to complete the installation.
- Start > Run >
iisreset
After enabling it (and running iisreset) we were able to access our pages and there was much rejoicing. The original source was Microsoft KBA 2196177.
Worked like a dream – thanks!
Worked! Thank you very much!
Thanks! – it works!
thanks! this was driving me nuts.
So does anyone have any suggestions on what to do when both these settings are correct and images ares still not showing up? I’ve been searching for hours for an answer and countless places have talked about the Static content (this the first to mention StaticFileHandler) however that was already set to StaticFileModule,DefaultDocumentModule,DirectoryListingModule when I looked at it. I’m on the Server Admin side of things trying to resolve this issue for the developers how dont believe it has anything to do with their code and must be a server/IIS installation problem.