All Your Metabase Are Belong to Us
We recently received an archived web cast on a DVD from the company that produced and hosted it live for us. The content included various clips of media (Windows Media & Real Video) that played on the left as several slides (PNG files) were flipped on the right. Our intent was to take this production, shove it up on a web server, and give our customers access after they’ve forked over a small amount of cash. Everything is working fine on the DVD they delivered, so in my typical fashion I put the contents up, and hoped to hell it would work without issues. Bzzzt. Wrong. Ass.
The slides aren’t rendering. The video is playing fine though, so it’s not a complete shit-show. Anyhow, to troubleshoot I attempt to access the URL of where one of the slides should be. 404. Fuckin’ seriously? I know the file is there. I turn on directory browsing (only temporarily) for the folder where the web cast resources reside and hit the directory in trusty rusty Firefox. As expected, a list of files appears. Great. Click. 404. What the Fraking hell? Try a few more times and get the same result. Hm…I think. These graphics files have no extensions on them. Now that’s certainly a bit odd.
Poking around a bit i find this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264968
It’s not quite what I’m looking for but I think it’s along the same lines. First of all, I already had the IIS Resource Kit installed. But I couldn’t find this so called MetaEdit anywhere. Luckily I have competent hosting providers (thank you RackSpace) who have offered Metabase Explorer on all of our servers. I’m eventually able to find the right MimeMap key, but of course there is no entry there for .*,application/octet-stream. There’s the issue. IIS can’t event fucking figure out what to do with a file unless it’s in this list you need scary tools to edit and who only knows why that entry isn’t in there as a default as you might think would be the case from the help document.
So I bite the bullet and add a new entry. Restart the www service, and finally, success! All is well in the land of files without extensions. Huzzah!