Moving from local hardware to a VM machine at Vultr, I ran into several silly issues but with Rick's help was able to over cone the first big one and then by taking a leap I discovered the second mystery.
First the application has been running in File and Com for over five years, so moving to a new machine seemed straight forward. But why did it seem like of all the sites I set up on the VM machine was IIS not responding to any of the hits on this known working application. As Rick discovered, Chrome was forcing HTTPS protocol. But why... turned out that on the old machine an SSL certificate existed and IIS URLRewrite was capturing the hit before my app server could respond. After installing Let's Encrypt the first hurtle was passed.
The next problem just as silly, the application serves up a rendered WCS page on the default hit to the site. But when the site was hit nothing was being returned except HTML > HEAD > BODY elements, the login page was not there. The WC server was set to reparse the page and the Response.ExpandPage() was all working. But after deleting the default_page.prg and allowing the server to recreate it, the application started working as expected. Not clear what the issue was here because I had deleted the FXP page earlier but that did not fix it.
Hopes this little write up helps the next person.
Thank you Rick for your help!
But after deleting the default_page.prg and allowing the server to recreate it, the application started working as expected. Not clear what the issue was here because I had deleted the FXP page earlier but that did not fix it.
This is usually caused by path problems with the page where the FXP was compiled living in a different location than the new deployed application. The old Web Control Framework (you're using _Page.prg so assume Web Control Framework) hardcoded the path to the template into the FXP and if the app moves to a different folder it can't find the template. Recompiling (or deleting and letting WWWC compile the page) fixes this.
This can also happen with template and scripts but is less likely there as scripts don't hard code any links - it can still happen with partials or other embedded scripts/templates though, so it it's always a good idea to delete the .fxp files from the compiled scripts when moving an app.
+++ Rick ---