Prompt to download webpage instead of open

Question

This AM I went to one of our sites http://mycompany.com and instead of opening as usual, IE prompted me to download a file (mycompany_com which happen to be the index.aspx file). I quickly tried other browsers, same thing...then other machines, same thing.

I then logged on the server, and grabbed all the logs. Then started to run through the index.aspx page to see if anyting was inserted....nothing. I then started to briefly check some of the logs (this is a Windows Server 2003 R2 box running IIS 6.0 and hosting 2 ASP.NET sites) but couldn't find anything out of the ordinary...I checked the FTP access log...nothing.

after a few mins, everything went back to normal. I then restarted IIS...I couldn't find any error in the logs indicating IIS or ASP.NET was having any problems.

Has anyone ever had an issie like this....should I be concerned?

Answer 1

Typically this happens because IIS is returning the wrong mime type with the response. If you look at the response headers using a tool like Fiddler, I'll bet that you'll see that you're not returning text/html, but a type that the browser doesn't render, such as application/unknown.