4.0 Installation Quirks

I have a question regarding the setup. I am running the 4.0 beta version and when I try to set it up on our development server and try running the site as a website I get the 404 when navigating to the admin section. I know that this is BETA and not for production, but I am wanting to set it up as a website with a domain that my office can access. I wanted it so that they could access it from home or wherever so that they can start to learn the new system.

Having said that, here are the steps I took. I used the manager to create a new project locally on my machine. I then got it setup and configured and added our office staff as users. Once this was complete, I then FTP'd the site up to our development server. From there I manually added a site to IIS and configure it as a normal site. I oointed the site to the directory where the files were FTP'd. From there, I added the silverlight extensions and then attempted to access the site. When navigating to the admin section, I was faced with the 404 error. After some messing around, I finally pushed the manager to our production server and created another site just to test. When trying to create the new site, I kept getting an error trying to create a new site in IIS unless the site was a virtual directory. The lightbulb went off. I went back to my original site and set it up as a virtual directory under another site. After this I was able to access the admin section.

So it seems that the BETA needs to be run as a virtual directory rather than as a site. When looking through the installation documentation, it only talks about running a site with a domain in regards to a trial message. Now I am aware of this and don't mind having it as this is just to demo it out. If you have to have a virtual directory in order for the extensionless urls to work, I would suggest adding this verbage to the Installation manual. It may help others as they demo this release.

Hi Richard Baugh,

Thank you for using our services.

The beta can be used to create websites of Sitefinity right under an empty website in IIS. The approach I use to this is to create a new website under IIS and leave it empty. Then use the project manager to create a new website by pointing it to this empty website. All works as expected. Regarding the 404 issue you are getting - could you please post it. It might be the case that the website is not configured properly - handlers for WCF services for example might be missing.

We have tried setting up the beta on an intranet site and the only problem we had was getting the trial message every N number of clicks around the site.

Regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Thanks for the reply. It made me go back and really look over the IIS settings from my virtual directory to my stand alone site I manually created. After a little time I found an interesting thing. Under the "Configuration" section where you setup application extensions, I noticed that the virtual directory had an entry in the "Wildcard application maps" section and the stand alone site didn't. I then added an entry, which just points to the isapi dll in the .net folder, and made sure that the "verify file exists" was not checked. After this one addition, I was able to navigate to the admin section and view the site.

Thanks again for making me look into the issue a little further. Maybe this will help others that might run into this later on.

Richard

Thanks for posting this!  I had the exact same problem.  After building it locally on my machine, then copying to the development machine and changing the settings you suggested.  

While I have direct access to our development machine, I will not have direct access to our production environment to change those settings, so I hope this will be resolved for the final release.

Nevermind.  While I can gain access to the administration section, I keep getting errors 'The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.<br>', or similar errors throughought the administration pages.

Richard,

Following your steps, I was able to gain access to the main administration page, but receive errors on all the other admin pages.  Have you not had an issue with this?

No I have not. I have been able to navigate the site, create pages and content. Everything seems to operational at this point.

Does your site name have any invalid characters in it? The few articles I saw mention an invalid path or url. I am not sure if your site name has anything to do with it or not. Just a guess.

Hello Preston,

Could you please be more specific and tell us what the error is? It might be a configuration issue with IIS - if you are running IIS 7.5 you will need to disable the WebDAVModule.

Kind regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Richard, are you using IIS 6 ?

WebDAV is disabled.  There is just always an error when I try to access most features on the admin page with IIS6.  None of these errors occur when I use the project manager to host the project.

The type of error changes as I troubleshoot, it is now 'page cannot be found' when trying to get access to features in the Admin section.  Could this be an issue with IIS6 and HTTPHandlers?

I am using IIS6 for our development server, windows 2003, and this is where I was getting the errors. My problems went away when I added the wildcard mapping. Attached is a screen shot of the wildcard mapping I was talking about. This is what worked for me. I know you mentioned that you already did this, but that was all that I needed to do in order to get rid of the 404 error.

Are you getting the errors just trying to get into the admin section or when trying to access a page/section of the admin area? I wasn't even able to get to the admin section before the wildcard mapping. After that I was able to access it.

Prior to adding the wildcard mapping, like you, I was unable to even get to the Admin page. After making the recommended changes, I was then able to get into the admin pages and click on the tabs, but receive a common error in most of the tabs.

I've attached a screen of the error along with the IIS mapping you mentioned.

Hi Preston Cooksey,

Check the HTTP GET/POST requests through firebug. It looks like the web service used to retrieve content items is blocked.

Kind regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

I've attached the screenshot with the response I'm getting from Fiddler. 

Thanks for all the follow up.

While I had thought I had modified the authentication mode for troubleshooting purposes, I just changed the authentication mode to anonymous, rather than windows integrated authentication with successful results.  Trying to implement both, caused different errors in the admin sections.  Can SF4 not use windows integrated authentication in any way?

Hi Richard,

Are you using Windows Integrated Authentication or Anonymous on your site?

I am using just the anonymous authentication. I too ran into the same error and just disabled the integrated authentication.

Hello Richard Baugh,

Please take a look at this post where we sent a reply about the same issue.

Sincerely yours,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Hi Neb,

You need Silverligh if you are going to use Images and Documents module where we use Silverlight based Upload and MediaPlayer controls.

All the best,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team