HTTP Redirect URL Corruption When Requested URL Contains a Trailing Forward Slash (289131)

SYMPTOMS

When you use the HTTP redirect option for virtual directories in Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0, HTTP clients may randomly redirect to non-existent files, which results in HTTP 404 errors on the client.

CAUSE

This problem occurs because IIS 5.0 stores an invalid string length for the redirected virtual directory source path, which results in corrupted redirects when the requested file is concatenated with the source string. The string length is stored incorrectly because the initial HTTP client request (which is used to set up the redirection cache blob for a redirected virtual directory) contains an additional terminating forward slash ("/").

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, do not use a terminating forward slash in the source for HTML elements that request a file from a redirected virtual directory on the IIS 5.0 server. For example, replace the following redirect source path

http://server/redirected_directory/

with this source path:

http://server/redirected_directory

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

260910 How to Obtain the Latest Windows 2000 Service Pack

The English version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later:

   Date       Time    Version        Size     File name   Platform
   -------------------------------------------------------------
   3/19/2001  05:41p  5.0.2195.3390  357,648  W3svc.dll   i386

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Internet Information Server 5.0. This problem was first corrected in Windows 2000 Service Pack 3.