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IIS 7.5 500 Error When Serving Static Files

April 22, 2015

Ran across an interesting problem. While setting up a new Windows 2008 R2 erver and website on IIS; I noticed that the site was generating 500 errors when serving static files (images, css, html, etc.)

I turned on Failed Request Tracing and noticed that I was getting this logged

This configuration section cannot be used at this path. 
This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. 
Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault="Deny"), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode="Deny" or the legacy allowOverride="false".

Based simply on previous experience I went to the IIS Feature Delegation and reviewed the delegation for the various IIS modules.

I found that by setting Handler Mappings to Read/Write the error was resolved.

I’m still not sure why this causes a problem since I’m not defining any custom handlers at the site level.

Perhaps this setting must be read/write even when custom handlers are set at the server level?