Re: HTTP Download of EXE

From: David Wang [Msft] (someone_at_online.microsoft.com)
Date: 03/18/04 

Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 20:16:37 -0800

IIS5.1 has a 10 connection limit and does not support compression.

I played around with this a bit, and I do not think it has anything to do
with IIS compression (I looked at both IIS5 and IIS6 Compression) nor
Chunked Encoding. I found different behavior depending on the client.
- From some IE clients, I was able to download or directly open an EXE that
was compressed.
- From other IE clients, if I first select "Save" (but not actually save),
Cancel, and THEN select "Open", then Open worked
- From other IE clients, the "Save, Cancel, then Open" trick from above does
not work, but the "Open" button was enabled
- From other IE clients, the "Open" options wasn't even enabled
- If there was no compression, everything worked.

Based on the fact that some clients CAN open an EXE that was compressed
while others cannot, I believe that this is some client-side behavior
triggered on Compression. In other words, I do not believe that Compression
is the problem; I believe how clients choose to handle compression is the
problem. Unfortunately, the only way to avoid client problems in handling
compression is to disable compression on the server, which is unfortunate. 

-- 
//David
IIS
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
//
"Scott Norberg" <snorberg@ecis.com> wrote in message
news:e$9Tp1DDEHA.628@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
More information.
We got this to work with a W2K server but we needed to uncheck both the HTTP
compression boxes on the master properties/service property page. This
doesn't seem right to me that we need to turn off static page and
application compression to get this to work.
I can't even find this page on IIS 5.1.
"David Wang [Msft]" <someone@online.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:ed5Q396CEHA.3804@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> "Open" is something done by the Client contingent upon hints sent by the
> server -- so it really has nothing to do with IIS and everything to do
with
> how you misconfigured the clients and server.
>
> Default IIS and IE settings works with both Open and Save, so I suspect
you
> need to check your server or client configuration.
> 1. If you used the same client against multiple servers with different
> results, then I suggest you check the MIME Type setting for the EXE
> extension on each web server
> 2. If you used different clients, then I suggest you check both the
server's
> settings and the client's MIME Type setting for the EXE extension.
>
> A easy way to diagnose this is to run a Network Trace program on the
client
> and sniff the exact HTTP response sent by each server and observe what is
> different between the ones that work and the ones that don't.
>
> If the responses are the same, then check client configuration; else,
check
> server configuration to figure out the difference.
>
> -- 
> //David
> IIS
> This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.
> //
> "Scott Norberg" <snorberg@ecis.com> wrote in message
> news:uDxQ441CEHA.684@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
> I am using an anchor to try to download a setup.exe file, similar to the
> following
>
>    <p>Download test</p>
>
> I get the typical File download dialog with the standard Open, save,
cancel
> and more info selections.
>
> If save is selected the file downloads just fine and can be executed from
> the download directory, but
> if Open is select nothing seems to happen.
>
> We have tried this from several web servers and the Open works from some
and
> not others. So there must be some setting keeping/letting this option from
> working.
>
> Can anyone shed some light on what to consider when doing this?
>
> Thanks
>
>
>
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