IIS and FastCGI/Trouble shooting

This page is a wiki list of problems and causes along with solutions.

Lack a working FCGI wrapper

Seen a screen like the following?

FastCGI Error
The FastCGI Handler was unable to process the request.

Error Details:

    * The FastCGI process exited unexpectedly
    * Error Number: -2147467259 (0x80004005).
    * Error Description: Unspecified error

HTTP Error 500 - Server Error.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

If you're using Perl, or the ilk, you probably forgot to set up an FCGI wrapper. This can occur if you try to replace CGI, with FastCGI and don't use something like IIS::FCGI, or an MVC fastcgi wrapper. Reference this book's perl-specific documentation at Scripting languages/Perl.

Another common cause is a misconfiguration script, or a script that crashes on startup. Make sure your fcgi script runs outside of the webserver environment (run it explicitly in the cmd shell).

Network failure

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... Read error (Connection reset by
peer) in headers
Retrying.

Connection Interrupted
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

These two errors can occur if you try to redirect stderr to the webserver rather than to stdout. Catalyst::Engine::FastCGI is known to have had this bug.