IIS6 redirection wildcards
Tonight I was asked to "not redirect" one folder on an entire site that is being redirected. Initially I was really scratching my head on this one. I tried making the folder its own app and pointing it at the orginal folder, but this didn't work. IIS kept overwriting my changes. Eventually I looked back at the IIS redirection variables and I saw the "!" (without quotes) redirection wildcard. I then put in the orginal url and appended it with the "!".
For example: The new site is named new.example.com and the old site was old.example.com.
At the root site I have a redirect in place pointing old.example.com to new.example.com and checking ""the exact URL entered above" and "a permanent redirection for this resource"
In the subfolder I had it redirect to: http://old.example.com/subfolder !
Well, that didn't work either. So I kept digging and found this link http://tinyurl.com/z8nuf in TechNet. To make it simple my redirect didn't need to have a URL in it at all, but rather these three characters "*;!" (without quotes). After I did that I was able to navigate to http://old.example.com/subfolder, but anything else redirected me to http://new.example.com. The great thing about this is that it can be used to "not" redirect folders or files.
Thanks MS for the Redirect Reference.