"Internal 500" error vs. a helpful message

[Bob]

Why does my IIS6 server sometimes give me very good error messages
from the VB/ASP interpreter... but mostly give me "Internal Server
error 500" messages?

Is there some way to force it to give the better error message all the
time? the 500 error is totally useless... time to hunt and peck. But,
I make a minor tweak in the code, perhaps 'fix' something very small
and I get "real" error message. Seems totally random as to which I
get.

Thanks,

 

[Paxton]

Why does my IIS6 server sometimes give me very good error messages
from the VB/ASP interpreter... but mostly give me "Internal Server
error 500" messages?

Is there some way to force it to give the better error message all the
time? the 500 error is totally useless... time to hunt and peck. But,
I make a minor tweak in the code, perhaps 'fix' something very small
and I get "real" error message. Seems totally random as to which I
get.

Thanks,

In IE, go to Tools > Options > Advanced, then uncheck the Show friendly
http error messages box.

/P.

 

[Bob]

In IE, go to Tools > Options > Advanced, then uncheck the Show friendly
http error messages box.

/P.

Thanks Paxton. Why is it so random as to when it shows the "real"
error and the 500 error? For example, I just had a program (before I
read your message) that was giving me the 500 error. I cut out the
section of code where I thought the problem was, it produced the page
just fine (lacking some content). I pasted the content back into the
same file I had just cut it out of to "prove" that I had narrowed the
bug - and instead of a 500 error I got the "real" error (unterminated
constant).

After applying your fix, even the original program is now working...
so I have a solution, but the somewhat random previous action is
puzzling.

 

[Paxton]

Thanks Paxton. Why is it so random as to when it shows the "real"
error and the 500 error? For example, I just had a program (before I
read your message) that was giving me the 500 error. I cut out the
section of code where I thought the problem was, it produced the page
just fine (lacking some content). I pasted the content back into the
same file I had just cut it out of to "prove" that I had narrowed the
bug - and instead of a 500 error I got the "real" error (unterminated
constant).

After applying your fix, even the original program is now working...
so I have a solution, but the somewhat random previous action is
puzzling.

The honest answer is I don't know why it was random. I suspected it
may be that the type of message you get is dependant on what process
encounters the error (ASP runtime, OLEDB provider etc), so to test this
theory, I set IE options to defaults, shut down and rebooted, saw that
Show friendly errors is checked and wrote a script with errors. I get
a detailed report, not a friendly error - regardless of the error type.

Consequently, my conclusion is that IE doesn't work as it should in
this area.

Switch to Firefox

/P.

 

[Bob]

Consequently, my conclusion is that IE doesn't work as it should in
this area.

Switch to Firefox

/P.

Thanks. That was always my fallback in the past for testing since IE
has never had a good "reload" function. I should have stuck with
"tried and true"... been away from this for too long.