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Again on 503, “Service Unavailable” in IIS7 x64

Getting feedback always nice, as it is getting suggestions about new posts as happened this morning with my colleague Michael Clemens after he read my latest entry from yesterday (so thanks Mike for sharing this!). The point is, you may get a similar experience (exactly vice versa) after having installed the “IIS media pack 1.0 – Web playlists and bit Rate Throttling package” as part of the Microsoft Web Platform installer” on a x64 OS version.

The media pack installs two 32-bit modules (“BitrateModule” and “PlaylistHandler”) that prevent a 64-bit application pool from starting up, resulting in a fail-fast disabled application pool. A look at the Application event log first tells you the application pool couldn’t load “%ProgramFiles%\IIS\Media\playlisthandler.dll”. Searching applicationHost.config for this module occurrence, you can simply adjust the affected <add> element with the preCondition attribute set to bitness32.

After this, the affected app pool still cannot start… ?

Back to the Application event log, you’ll see another module load failure for “%ProgramFiles%\IIS\Media\bitratemodule.dll“. Changing this in the same manner as for the PlaylistHandler module will give you the following entry in applicationhost.config added below the <globalmodules> section:

<add name="BitrateModule" image="%ProgramFiles%\IIS\Media\bitratemodule.dll" preCondition="bitness32" />

Do not forget to search the whole “%windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config” for any additional module entries (in <add> elements) on these two modules to ensure they all specify the preCondition attribute with bitness32.

And last but not least, if you did end up with a fail-fast disabled application pool, do not forget to start it again…?

Carlo

Quote of the day:
Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives. – Maurice Chevalier

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