I started exploring RavenDB today and the first part was to get an instance running under IIS, specifically running under IIS 7.5 (Windows 7). This is a quick post to help explain a very simple issue I had because of my lack of familiarity with IIS 7.5. I downloaded the latest binaries and followed the instructions for setting up RavenDB can be found here . This was very quick and simple, I thought I had everything working, but then I started seeing the following: I know RavenDB is being loaded into the IIS Worker Process - because I can see 'Raven' in the error message. Apart from that ' Your request didn't match anything that Raven knows to do, sorry... ' didn't really help point me in any useful direction. I can't even tell if the problem is related to RavenDB or IIS 7.5. It turns out the problem was related to the ACL for the website configured in IIS 7.5. Specifically I hadn't associated the Application Pool Identity with the website. ...