How to redirect a specific browser in IIS7

Web services is one of those funny things that once it is setup, you really can simply leave it running for eternity and it will just keep on working, besides the regular vulnerability patch, but that will almost never require you to change the config. Even if you do need to add some form of webpage to IIS(Internet Information Services) it is very easy to configure and gone are the days of fiddling for endless hours to make something, which should be so easy, actually work properly.


Having said all this, I found that trying to redirect specific browsers to specific pages to be a some what painful experience when it came to IIS7. It wasnt a "hard" process, but the syntax for it can be some what .... Annoying.

It all started because we have users occasionally ring us up claiming they cannot install printers. We have now been, for a number of years, using the Microsoft IPP webpage solution to allow our users to install printers which works very well but here is the kicker. It only works properly in internet explorer. I don't care what anyone says or what the technet says. It simply works perfectly in IE, nothing else.
So how do I go about trying to force my users who have already been told 1000 times they need to use IE and even with a note at the top of the webpage still ring up asking why it wont work... We force a page up telling them to open Internet Explorer of course :) and thus the saga begins


To get started make sure you have at lease IIS7(no this will NOT work on IIS6, upgrade you slacko) and install the URL Rewriter module from Microsoft.

When you open your IIS Manager you will now get a pretty URL Rewriter icon, yay!!

Open the URL Rewriter and select "Add Rules" in the top right corner.

Select Black Rule and press OK

Match URL
Name: IE Allow
Using: Wildcards
Pattern: *
This means anything that hits this webserver will have this rule apply since the pattern we are searching for is * and wildcards apply, it applies to everything :)

Conditions
Select Add
Condition Input: {HTTP_USER_AGENT}
Pattern: *MSIE*
It will search the User Agent to see if it contains MSIE in it, since basically no third party browser ever wants to claim to be IE this works pretty well.

 Action
Action Type: Redirect
Redirect URL: www.google.com
This will redirect the webpage if the conditions are true, ie that Internet Explorer is used which will contain the MSIE in the User Agent. Google is just a place holder, you can forward it to what ever url you want, such as a page telling them to use firefox or chrome instead of IE :)

This rule will now redirect IE to a different URL but all the other browsers will simply pass through to the webpage since the rule does not apply to them. Since the most common theme is to actually block IE, rather than force it as I have done.(I hope your happy, you know who I am talking to person that complained about the doco I originally typed!) Obviously with this you can basically get any combo of browser to connect or not connect to your website all you will need to do is change the User Agent strings it is searching for. A massive list of User Strings for basically any browser can be found here so now you can make weird and wonderful rules to your hearts content!

Here is a list of website that helped me along the way in getting this working
There are all posts/blogs that helped me understand the formatting, I actually did it through the XML, then worked out you can do it through the UI easily as well.
- http://www.58bits.com/blog/2009/07/11/how-to-ban-internet-explorer-6-from-your-site-using-the-iis7-url-rewrite-module/
- http://forums.iis.net/t/1169853.aspx
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/23/introducing-ie9-s-user-agent-string.aspx
- http://forums.iis.net/p/1186609/2012883.aspx
The Microsoft doco on using URL Rewriter. its actually pretty good and easy to read
- http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/734/url-rewrite-module/