Welcome to another installment of the DotNetNuke Tips to help simplify your life. This is a simple one, but can save you a TON of headache and troubleshooting.
I was helping a coworker out today, trying to track down a gremlin for a new development install on Windows XP SP2. The coworker, we'll call Whistle, was having troubles getting his new environment up and running. The site wouldn't run thus it wouldn't create the proper database tables, stored procs and related data.
After a few minutes of beating his head on the desk I sat down to assist. He had completed the usual setup process, created a database, extracted the ZIP file, modified the web.config file for the newly created database, and of course, he set the proper permissions on the folders.
But for some reason the site wouldn't load in IE, repeating errors that DNN was unable to modify the web.config file. After his 10 minutes, and myself spending another 5 minutes trying to get it running we ran across the most simplest of issues, that I'm sure many of you have also faced, as have I a few times as well.
When you setup the permissions on your folders, if you're on a domain, and setting up an IIS5 machine (Win2k or XP) be sure to change the "LOCATION" of the user to be the local machine and not the domain ASPNET user!
Such a simple thing, yet very easy to miss and hard to track down. Stay tuned for more DotNetNuke tips, brought to you by Chris Hammond from Engage Software.