.ini files not recognized by website

I'm not sure if this is the correct forum to use or not...
But our website(which is on a Windows 2000 server and using IIS) will not recognize ini files. When I enter the website address followed by the name of the ini file, it says the page is not found. However, when I rename that same file to have a txt extension, and then try to access that file as part of the URL it works just fine.

Is there some setting that is needed in the web server so that it recognizes an ini file?
Thank you,
Julia

What do you expect to happen when you point your browser at an ini file?

It's possible there is a filter in IIS since showing ini files could be quite a security problem in some servers.

At the least, when pointing to a file that does exist on a server, if the browser can't execute it, then it usually pops up with a prompt to open/save the file. That is what it does on our other server. On the server that is the problem - the browser just says that the file/page is not found. That is also what happens with the program that we are actually ultimately wanting to read the ini file with.
Julia

Check for MIME types and make sure you have configured that extension on website.

Website>properties>home directory>Configuration>Application Mappings.

HTH.

I'm just getting back to this problem as we found a work around, but now I have to figure out how to get the site to recognize ini files again because the work around no longer will do.

Thank you for the tip on looking at the extensions that are supported - ini is listed as an extension with notepad as the application. But the ini file can still not be accessed through the website. Any other suggestions?

THank you,
Julia

Odd timing, but I'm seeing a related issue right now. IIS sends back 404's for existing .log files, which is preferred, but it's also doing it to .ico files. I tried adding a lovely favicon.ico in the root of the web server and accessing it directly comes back with 404's. This doesn't make any sense to me, and I'm searching application mappings, machine.config, web.config, etc, I'm not seeing anything that should be denying it (and unless there's some security threat in the .ico format, I can't think of any reason why these would be denied like ini/log files).

Also, my local IIS is running v5 and I can see .log's, but the production server is running v6 and it denies them. There's got to be some central repository of these "hidden" file extentions somewhere, as this behavior really doesn't make much sense.

I don't remember for sure, but maybe there is some IIS setting to enable/disable favicons.

After some issues this morning and a restart of IIS, favicon.ico started showing up. Maybe IIS caches it and only rechecks existance on startup? Dunno.

Another thing I ran across was in IIS Mgr, right click the computer name at the top (not the website) go to Properties and from there there's an Edit button for MIME types. Maybe that list is responsible for some of this. Julia, are .ini files listed there?