Friday, January 4, 2008

IIS 6.0, ISO files, and MIME types

I'm using a classroom Web server more and more to deliver things to students during seminars. I chose IIS 6.0 for no particular reason other than I was teaching a Windows class at the time. (As you may know, I have no particular loyalty to any operating system...they are, after all, just operating systems.) Anyway, I recently wanted to serve .iso files to students (CD-ROM images) for a particular class. I copied them into the server root, but when I tried to use either a browser or wget to retrieve them, I kept getting 404 errors. Turns out that IIS 6.0 will not serve unknown file types. It was a simple matter to fix it. In the Internet Services Manager console in W2K3, right-click on the server name and choose properties. Click the MIME types button, enter .iso for the file type and "application/octet-stream" for the MIME-type. Restart the server and you're rockin'. Hope this helps you. Oh, and here's the KB article at MS: http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=326965

1 comment:

NickC said...

Thanks for this! Really helped me out. The same thing happens in IIS 7 as well.