503 Service Unavailable for reports area of an ASP.NET MVC application

Recently I come across to strange problem where all hyperlinks are working fine in ASP.NET MVC based project except link “Reports”.  

Whenever user clicks on “Reports” link, browser shows “HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable”.

Developers are not able to debug it. Fiddler also not showing any HTTP request / response details.

Solution:

When I analyze problem, I noted that complete URL of link “Reports” is http://abcd.com/Reports

I googled this issue then come to know that it was due to SQL Reporting services having reserved the link “Reports” for http://+:80/Reports url in http.sys.

If SQL server reporting services are installed on your machine then just try to access “http://localhost/Reports” from browser. You should get SQL Server Reporting Services Home page.

Here is the solution

·         Either changed the URL from having name Reports to some new name

·         Or try following command

netsh http delete urlacl url=http://+:80/Reports

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