Well, sometimes things come along that give you humility. Gahh!

I had an old Windows 2000 server running in a closet on a DSL line. It was doing a small amount of web and mail and ftp for a couple of users. It was there for almost 10 years.

It started to blue screen and I determined it was probably too much trouble to try to fix it, it had been running so long and though I had set it up originally I was having a hard time remembering the darned thing.  

So anyway, nothing fancy, it had a few websites with just static pages, a couple that had browsable directories and one user who dropped off FTP files.  No big deal and it ran mostly unattended all that time.

So when it failed I had a small PC with server 2003 on it and running, not in use.  I took the old server HDD out and put it in the newer one with server 2003.  I copied the inetpub directories over to the new server just as they were with no changes. I changed the name of the inetpub from the windows server 2003 and they are still there but replaced.

I went through and set up the hosting same as before.  Name based hosting with host headers. Mailenable for mail and a third party FTP server.  That all seemed to work.  Well, sort of. Admittedly this was not a fresh clean install of the OS and it was someone's print server sometime in the past. 

So anyway.  Here's what I have. 

For one thing there were some under construction pages put on there just so there would be something in front of the browsable subdirectories. They had a jpg and a gif image on them. 

The jpg loaded fine when you browsed the site but the gif didn't, it was a placeholder, when you right clicked the placeholder and picked view image you got

You are not authorized to view this page

You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.

Please try the following:

• Contact the Web site administrator if you believe you should be able to view this directory or page.
• Click the Refresh button to try again with different credentials.

HTTP Error 401.1 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

So permissions, I think. 

Before I worked on it I got something like "bad hostname". I finally figured all that out (as far as it went) and now I have a pure pemissions error.

I need this stuff to work with anonymous internet users. I created a user internet_guest and gave it guest and user membership.  But I am not sure that is the user that is used by anonymous internet users.  And that might be part of the problem after the gif problem, that is.

For the life of me I have been unable to reset the permissions to allow the gif images to work, so I replaced them with jpg versions and they now work.  But clearly this server has a problem serving up gifs and that's something I need to solve.

The other problem is I have a directory that I want browsable and that is not, though on the old server it was.  Another directory on the same domain is browsable.  And darned if I know what the difference is. The permissions look the same to me.

As far as I can tell FPSE is not installed though the directory (which I copied from the disk in the old computer) has some directories labeled VTI, and I don't know what those are for. I buried them in another directory just to get rid of but my research indicates those might have been part of Front page server extensions which in remove/install windows components is not installed.

Any troubleshooting steps anyone can recommend?