Would the lack of an asterisk on the site bindings prove to be problematic when the intention is to have "All Unassigned" selected on the binding for the IP address? It appears to be our automation might've created a binding that selects "All Unassigned" but we don't get the asterisk as you would normally if you created the binding manually. Please take a look at the bindingwithout an asterisk below, yet the settings indicate the asterisk on the IP Address column should exist.
Here, I simply de-select "All Unassigned" (without clicking OK) then re-selecting "All Unassigned" on the IP Address binding option. Then the asterisk appeared!
So I was curious what the actual syntactical difference was in the applicationHost.config file was.
Here's the config without the asterisk and with the asterisk. Some differences here..
Finally, it seems this paragraph from IIS.NET indicates the asterisk is critical to allow any IP address to access the binding. So my concern now is our configuration here willnot allow all IP address because of the missing asterisk. Admittedly, I did try to access this site over the public IP and I was able to access the site fine. The one thing I haven't yet confirmed on that front is we're behind a load balancer and perhaps some front end machines are configured with a binding with the asterisk. In the meantime if anyone can shed any light on that, I'd really appreciate it. Hopefully, what I'll hear is this asterisk mystery is only a cosmetic difference, since the binding settings are identical between with asterisk and without asterisk (well, except that the apphost file is a bit different, but..)