Windows Server 2012/IIS8 Permissions issues

I’m using Windows 2008 and IIS7. I’ve never found any documentation on www.remarpro.com about Windows securities settings. It is an ongoing mystery involving trial and error.

The following old Dreamweaver article on the adobe site gave me the most insight into security settings for WordPress.

Understanding Anonymous Authentication and the IUSR account.

As a general rule, when there is a problem with WordPress related security settings on a Windows server, I find the security settings for the IUSR user on a folder is either missing completely or incorrect (missing the “write” permission and/or the “modify” permission).

Thanks for this, I have spent so many hours searching I can’t believe there is no definitive answer.

Please WordPress, give us poor Windows users an answer!

Regards
Pete

I have been fighting on this for hours and even when the IUSR has full control it only gives the permission to the different size files.

Describe what you mean exactly by full control.

Here’s what I do when I have permission problems on Windows, IIS7
(which is often):

Using Windows Explorer, right click on the root folder where WordPress is installed. Click on the security tab and you should see IUSR listed under the “Group or usesrname” panel.

Highlight the IUSR user to see which permissions exist. Under normal circumstances, you should see that Read & Execute, List folder contents, Read and Write are all ticked. This should be sufficient for normal WordPress operations and files and folders within this folder should inherit these permissions.

There are times when upgrading a plugin or WordPress itself, I find it necessary to add the “Modify” permission. I do my upgrade, then I go back and turn off the “Modify” permission. Not nice but sometimes the only way I can get upgrades done.

I hope this helps.

Thanks, I checked the wwwroot folder permission and IUSR group had the modify permission on it so I took it away and then uploaded a file.

The main files example.jpg shows and then example-400×400.jpg example-300×200.jpg etc.

If I double click on the example.jpg I get access denied and then I try and look at the permission there is no owner of that file. I was thinking that this was a error in wordpress with IIS but my other test server does not have this problem.

When I double click on any of the other files it opens in paint on the server. Also has the owner of IUSR.

I don’t understand how the owner can change???

Thank you very much for the help.

When I talk about the root folder, I am not talking about the wwwroot folder under the inetpub folder. I am referring to the physical folder where your wordpress files for the relevant website are installed.

In the IIS dashboard, when you “add a site” you have to specify the physical path where the website files will reside. The folder you specify here is what I refer to as the wordpress root folder. This is the folder you need to inspect with windows explorer (right click, properties, security tab) to see if the IUSR user has the correct permissions.

I can provide more specific details with screen shots if this still isn’t clear to you.

Thanks for the clarification muddg,

This wordpress install is in the root of wwwroot and not in a folder. I have created a new wordpress install on another drive and this problem is not happening on the new site. I am thinking the hosting company has some kind of permissions that are out of the ordinary on the C drive.

Now onto PHP upgrade that keeps crashing the server…..

Thanks for the help.