Error – This configuration section cannot be used at this path.

This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault=”Deny”), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode=”Deny” or the legacy allowOverride=”false”.

Hi All,

Today new issue and solution 🙂

Background: We have developed MVC Asp.net web application. We want to publish the web application in IIS. We have the new Windows 2012 R2 server where IIS is not installed. So we launched “Add Roles and Features Wizard” dialog from Server Manager as

Fig 1 : Add Roles and Features Wizard

Click on “Next” button selected the Installation Type as “Role-based or feature-based installation” as

Fig 1 : Add Roles and Features Wizard – Installation Type

Then from “Server Roles” we have selected the “Web Server (IIS)” as

Fig 3 : Add Roles and Features Wizard – Server Roles – IIS

We have IIS ready on the server. We have published our MVC Asp.net web application on the server.

Issue: When we are trying to access the our web application on the server we are getting as following issue

“This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault=”Deny”), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode=”Deny” or the legacy allowOverride=”false”.”

Solution: We googled bit and found some couple of references. Issue is while installing we also need to select the following roles from “Application Development Feature” as

.Net extensibility 4.5 (current .Net framework installed on the server)

ASP.NET 4.5

ISAPI Extensions

ISAPI Filters

Fig 4 : Add Roles and Features Wizard – Server Roles – Application Development

Once we have installed those missing roles, we could access our site 🙂

References:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9794985/config-error-this-configuration-section-cannot-be-used-at-this-path

https://serverfault.com/questions/360438/iis-complains-about-a-locked-section-how-can-i-find-out-where-its-locked