Serving PDF files from Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Edition
I just moved a site that has a large collection of pdf files that are searchable though a verity collection from being hosted on Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Edition. Much to my disbelief, I was unable to download many of the pdf files on the new server. After doing a little searching I found out that there is a known issue with IIS 7.5 and serving pdf files. According to chatter on the net the problem revolves around how IIS 7.5 does byte-range requests and a bug in the Adobe Reader plugins. More information is available on the this thread at forums.iis.net.
To solve this problem, I made the following change to the mime type in IIS for the pdf extension so that the value is application/octet-stream instead of application/pdf. This forces the user to save the pdf file in some cases but allows the entire file too be download and viewed none the less. I figure that this is a decent compromise until a official patch is released from Microsoft.
Comments
edit: This was just released: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979543
@Ed - Glad that my post was able to help. I also real excited to see that a patch is finally available. I look forward to trying it out.
Hi, I've been tearing my hair out for days trying to work out this bug. The MIME alteration worked perfectly, and keeps users out of my (remaining) hair. Is there a timeframe on a patch from MS? Thanks for your help, simple fix. Ed