help me! i've tried EVERYTHING!

hey everyone. first time poster here... i have a very interesting problem.

so heres the deal... i work for a library and i've been in charge of their website. they just got a new webserver and they've been having trouble moving the website over. the old server was NT 4 and IIS 4.0. the new server is win server 2003 and IIS 6.0. i figured it would be an easy job but... of course not. whenever i try to view the site in IE i get either a 'page cannot be found' or 'not authorized' message. i contacted the people that are supposed to be our technical support but you all probably know how that usually goes.

so heres the thing. at first i thought maybe it was a permissions problem. i checked all of them and they look fine to me. the IUSR account is there and set to read only. at one point i even tried allowing full access to everyone but i still got the not authorized message. so i couldnt figure that out. eventually i just stopped getting that message. i still get it sometimes but not nearly as often as before.

now as for the page cannot be found problem. this has me completely stumped. in the default content page listing i have index.html, index.shtml and default.htm. index.html is there so it should go to it but for whatever reason, it wont. but if i rename it to default.htm, it shows up. it makes no sense. i tried removing index.shtml and default.htm from the list thinking that way it would only have one file to look for but no dice. then i disbaled the default content page and tried going to site_address/index.html but it still said page cannot be found. then i tried renaming it to default.htm and going to site_address/default.htm and guess what. it worked. so how does that make sense? its the same file, just a different name. and when it does show up, the menus arent there. the menus are called using a server side include command. maybe that has something to do with it.

i guess if worse comes to worse, i could take out the include command and just paste the menu coding in and rename it to default.htm. the only problem is that i'd have to go through every single page and have it point to default.htm rather than index.html. do any of you have any idea why any of this is happening? i've been working at it for days and havent found any solution yet. thanks in advance.

First, you must explicitly enable asp if you are using asp.

Next, it sounds like .html is not in your default documents. I don't know IIS6 but the IIS service manager should offer places to change these settings.

Windows 2003 server does not ship with IIS installed by default. You are going to have to do all the configuring on your own. Since IIS 6.0 is somewhat new, Microsoft has put their documentation on their site to help us out.
Please make sure that you have configured IIS according to Microsoft specifications laid out at IIS 6.0 Technical Reference
Click on the IIS technical Reference menu option on the left pane.
Another good site for IIS 6.0 documentation and for Windows 2003 Server is at Labmice.net
If after setting up IIS using Microsoft's guide, you are still having problems, post your question back on this forum.

i'm not too familiar with IIS6 either. i'm pretty sure .html is in the default document list. i found a list with a bunch of extensions like asp, shtml, etc and it was in there. strange part is, .htm is not. so i dont know. i'll fiddle some more and give that technical reference a try.

nevermind. i just got it. turns out i just needed to play around with some web service extensions. thanks for your help. this was killing me for days!

No problem, if you need help with some of the other settings on IIS, just make another post.