I have a website setup in IIS7, exampledomain.com.

Under the application exampledomain.com lives a sub application cms.

In a rather convoluted way, we have content in our cms system in this sub-app, under cms\content\{generatedfoldername}.

So to access an image in this content, the full URL would be http://www.exampledomain.com/cms/cms/content/{generatedfoldername}/image.jpg, (yes, cms twice...) and this works just fine.

Now, we have a virtual directory under the parent website, called stuff which points at the content of the cms. So I should be able to get to the image using the url http://www.exampledomain.com/stuff/{generatedfoldername}/image.jpg.

Unfortunately this gives a server 500 error "There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed."

Whilst you do have to log into the cms system to access any of the admin pages within, I don't think the image files are protected by login, or else the first example URL wouldn't work, right? Also it's a server 500 error, rather than a 403.

I'm sure I must be missing something obvious here- will the virtual directory be using the permissions defined in the parent application, or the subapplication to which it is pointing? Or is there some other permissions I may have missed?

Sorry, that was a bit long, thanks for reading all the way down here! (I also must point out that I'm pretty new to the server management stuff.)

edit: also, we have

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">

specified in the webconfig of the parent app, so it's hopefully not the issue described in this config file hierarchy article.