All Errors, All The Time: app_offline.htm, "The resource cannot be found", and non-stop 404's

This post — http://dotnet.org.za/armand/archive/2005/07/03/38757.aspx — saved me from spontaneous, self-inflicted baldness.

I’ve been updating www.benday.com over the last few days and for about 4 hours this afternoon it was totally dead.  Any aspx page that I tried to execute would come up as “404 – Resource cannot be found” even though the file was definitely there.

Turns out that there’s a special file named “app_offline.htm” that will torpedo your web app just by being in the directory.  I’m not sure where this file came from but it was in my web directory and had 0 bytes in it.  Deleted that file and everything’s back to normal.

Anyway, thanks to armanddp for the post.

-Ben