i understand what you mean Declic. I am having the same problem with the permission for the whole site. it is a shame that I still couldnt get my site to go live even though I managed to overcome the installation stage. It was not a good experience. I wasted many nights on the installation alone.

I am now thinking whether to continue wasting my time getting DNN to overcome the permission problem thrown every now and then or my web host is doing a very bad job in granting my request to have necessary user have read/write access to tht specific folder.

In my case, I have requested numerous time to let network service and aspnet user to have write access to my wwwroot folder and the folder where I install DNN. Yet the permission problem still crop up. I can't even upload files to the server via DNN. Does this means I have to make another request to have C:\ to have write access as well? It doesnt make sense to me since IIS virtual folder is inside C:\hostname\wwwroot\..., therefore permission given to wwwroot, and propagate to all its child folder should do the trick.

If I am just a normal person with no knowledge of ASP.NET and IIS, all this would mean nothing, but since I am a developer myself and unable to get my own DNN to work properly on a shared hosting site really drives me up the wall.

Some say it is not wise to install DNN in a subfolder, but how can I migrate all my files and settings to the root folder without the need to reinstall everything, not to mention the changes that I've done?

DV, I suggested you read the security documents mainly because I didn't want to contradict what they said. You also asked how I have my installs setup so here goes. My install is on E:\DNN_Installs\GMSS so Network Service has Read on E:\, and DNN_Installs and has Read\Write on GMSS. I'm pretty sure that's not the best practice so it's a "Use at your own risk" situation. Really the only place you should need Read/Write is on the Portals folder like Steve said and then you'd turn Write on the DNN install folder when upgrading DNN or adding/upgrading a module or skin.

praetorion, I suspect your install problems where related to the permissions as well but that's just a guess. I do know that the one time I forgot to set the Network Service permissions to Read for the root that a lot of the modules wouldn't install and caused errors. C:\ shouldn't need write permissions but it does need read permissions. The problem why just having the permissions on wwwroot doesn't work is because when the code is looking for the location it checks seems to check things in order instead of just checking the complete path (Is there a C:\? Yes, is there a wwwroot? Yes. etc.) and if Network Service doesn't have permissions to read C:\ then it can see if there's a wwwroot directory on there so it throws an error. I've run into the same thing with a couple of Windows apps I've written so it's a by product of .NET and not DNN.

I'm running on Windows 2003 Server.