Transferring a phpBB board from one to another server is not implicitly easy. Especially transferring boards from servers running Apache to IIS based webservers seemed to be a very hard task. After transferring files and database we were encountering a HTTP 503 service unavailabe result from web request on the new machine.
Getting more information about HTTP 503 is tricky. As the new server is a really new server running Windows Server 2008 with PHP extension in IIS as FastCGI and this is the first time we are running this configuration we had problems to identify the problem. Several technical websites describe similar configurations and errors in likewise several contexts. So we tried a lot of configuration changes (persissions, IIS settings, PHP integration via ISAPI, Firewall rules, etc.). The main problem were missing log entries. We got no event log entries, the firewall did not protocol any denies, the webserver had also no entries pointing to the problem.
We found the pro... View In Full
