Cannot upload large files on on Windows Server 2003

Applies to: Content Studio ver. 3.5 and 4.0 prior to build 1009 running on Windows Server 2003

When uploading large files (+ 200K) to Content Studio the server returns a 403 error and the upload process is stopped. This error does not occur on Content Studio ver. 4.0 build 1009 and later.

IIS 6.0 prevent the upload of files larger than 200K. In the article AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed Microsofts describes this limitation. For IIS 6.0 users, the AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed property specifies the maximum number of bytes allowed in the entity body of an ASP request. If a Content-Length header is present and specifies an amount of data greater than the value of AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed, IIS returns a 403 error response. This limitation reveals itself in combination with the third party product AspSmartUpload component that Content Studio make use of. This component uploads data in chunks that are larger that the default allowed value for ASP.

Starting with Content Studio version 4.0 build 1009 (released March 31th 2005) a new upload functionality is supplied and this is no longer a problem.

This property is related in function to MaxRequestEntityAllowed, but is specific to ASP request. Whereas you might set the MaxRequestEntityAllowed property to 1 MB at the general World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) level, you may choose to set AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed to a lower value, if you know that your specific ASP applications handle a smaller amount of data. Open your metaBase.XML file which is located in c:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv in Notepad or another text editor, find the line "AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed" and change its value to "1073741824" (default value is "204800"). Before saving your changes you must stop IIS or you might need to start windows in Safe-mode to be able to change that file, otherwise it's being used by IIS. Stopping the IIS can be done by executing the command  iisreset /stop at the command prompt and the command iisreset /start will start IIS again after that you have saved the changes.

This problem has been fixed in version 4.0 build 1009.