Enabling ASP Pages in IIS 6.0

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting environment that you can use to create dynamic and interactive Web pages, and build powerful Web applications. When the server receives a request for an ASP file, it processes server-side script code contained in the file to build the HTML Web page that is sent to the browser. In addition to server-side script code, ASP files can contain HTML (including related client-side scripts), as well as calls to Component Object Model (COM) components that perform a variety of tasks, such as connecting to a database or processing business logic.

Important

To help minimize the attack surface of the server, IIS 6.0 is not installed on Windows Server 2003 by default. When you first install IIS 6.0, it is locked down -- which means that only request handling for static Web pages is enabled, and only the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service) is installed. None of the features that sit on top of IIS are turned on, including ASP, ASP.NET, CGI scripting, FrontPage® 2002 Server Extensions from Microsoft, and WebDAV publishing. If you do not enable these features, IIS returns a 404 error. You can enable these features through the Web Service Extensions node in IIS Manager. For more information, see Enabling Web Service Extensions. For more information about how to troubleshoot 404 errors and other issues, see Troubleshooting in IIS 6.0.

Procedures

To enable ASP pages

  1. In IIS Manager, expand the local computer, and then click Web Service Extensions.

  2. In the details pane, click Active Server Pages, and then click Allow.

Note

If your ASP pages require ISAPI, CGI, Microsoft ASP.NET, WebDAV, or other extensions to operate, you will need to enable those extensions as well.