IIS Crashing when trying to check or edit site bindings and/or website closing connections abruptly

Olivier Ragain
Aug 31, 2018 · 1 min read

Symptoms

Here is a list of symptoms for this issue:

• Website abruptly closes connection and no content loaded,

• Browsers say the connection is secure but cannot provide certificate details,

• IIS refuses to open the site bindings or basic/advanced settings

Source

The issue seems to stem from our TFS deployment not removing the default binding *:443 when we deploy ASP .Net Core websites. This creates multiple binding for the same url in:

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config

This seems to throw off the IIS Manager and make it sometimes crash

Workaround

  • Edit the applicationHost.config
  • Remove all references to *:443:* or other ‘port’
  • Run iisreset
  • Open IIS Manager

You should now be able to open the Site Bindings on the website having issues and you should be able to check the cert being used for the website and set it properly

Further work

Need to find why TFS adds a default wildcard:port binding when it deploys some websites (QA claims for now).

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