Has anybody managed to install DNN in a Web farm on IIS7/Windows 2008? The installation wizard doesn't seem to be able to complete the permission checks successfully when Web app uses UNC path...

Local installation works, IIS6 is fine with UNC path, but when running on IIS7/Windows 2008 RC0, Directory.CreateDirectory in InstallWizard.aspx.vb fails with "Access Denied" no matter what the permissions in IIS, file share, and file system:

-> Everyone has Full Control to share, folder, subfolders, root drive, everywhere
-> Anonymous included in Everyone through security policy
->DOMAIN\SERVER$, NETWORK SERVICE, ANONYMOUS LOGON all have Full Control
-> There is litterally not a single built-in account, user account, or machine account left on my test systems without Full Control...
-> IIS uses domain admin account to access file share
-> AppPool uses domain admin identity
-> Anonymous IIS user mapped to domain admin
-> CasPolicies seem OK. Modified InstallWizard.aspx.vb to skip permissions checks and wizard will load db and complete just fine, but of course this isn't a solution--just a check to see if everything else worked.

I guess the question is how to get Directory.CreateDirectory(path) to work on IIS7 if path is in UNC format???

Any ideas and hints appreciated.

Hi Sebastian,

Yes, and a bunch of KB articles for SMB adjustments, etc. It all works when I use IIS6 on Windows 2003 R2... and just this morning I found out that it also works on IIS7/Windows 2008 RC0 - 32 bit... well, that's at least something... but it doesn't work on x64 Windows 2008 RC0. On x64, you can enable 32-bit support in the classic-mode AppPool. According to IIS.NET it is even a preferred configuration to run in WOW64 because of the smaller address space while IIS enjoys the full adress space, larger paged and non-paged memory pools, etc. Well, well.

Maybe it is just  an ASP.NET 2.0 bug. After all, System.IO and CreateDirectory are not DNN-specific. I am just wondering if there isn't a magic compatibility switch that I have overlooked or if this is a known problem so that I can stop asking around for a solution. I would really like to run my DNN 4.7 web farm on x64 Windows 2008. Going back to 32-bit OS is not really an option in my environment.

Thanks for your fast response, Sebastian!