I receive an "Access Deined" COMException when I try to connect to a remote IIS 6 server from my C# application that is running under IIS 5.1.
Any ideas? I am experiencing all the same issues with the original questions.
Update - 4/1/09
I found this solution (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/Start_Stop_IIS_Website.aspx) that consists of a window application connecting to an IIS server to start and stop web sites. I am able to run it on my workstation and connect to the IIS server.
Ugh....why can I run this stand alone application but not my ASP.NET application?
Original
I receive an "Access Denied" COMException when I try to connect to IIS from a remote machine using the DirectoryEntry.Exist method to check to see if the IIS server is valid.
string path = string.Format("IIS://{0}/W3SVC", server);
if(DirectoryEntry.Exist(path))
{
//do something is valid....
}
I am a member of an active directory group that has been added to the Administrators groups to the IIS server I am trying to connect to.
Has anyone experience this issue and know how to resolve it?
UPDATE:
#Kev - It is an ASP.NET application. Also, I can connect without an username and password to the remote server through IIS6 Manager.
#Chris - I am trying to connect to the remote server to display the number of virtual directorys and determine the .NET framework version of each directory. See this SO question.
#dautzenb - My ASP.NET application is running under IIS 5.1 trying to connect to an IIS 6 server. I can see fault audits in the security log for my local ASPNET account on the remote server. When I try to debug the application, I am running under my domain account and still get the Access is denied.
UPDATE 2:
#Kev - I was able to establish to create a DirectoryEntry object using the following overload:
public DirectoryEntry
(
string path,
string username,
string password
)
But, all of the properties contain a " threw an exception of type 'System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException'" while I debug the app.
Also, the AuthenticationType property is set to Secure.
UPDATE 3:
The following two failure audit entries were in the remote IIS server's security event log every time I tried to establish a connection:
First event:
Event Category: Account Logon
Event ID: 680
Log attempt by: MICROSOFT_AUTHENTICATION_PACKAGE_V1_0
Logon account: ASPNET
Source Workstation:
Error Code: 0xC0000234
Second event:
Event Category: Logon/Logoff
Event ID: 529
Logon Failure:
Reason: Unknown user name or bad password
User Name: ASPNET
Domain: (MyDomain)
Logon Type: 3
Logon Process: NtLmSsp
Authentication Package: NTLM
Workstation Name: (MyWorkstationId)
Caller User Name: -
Caller Domain: -
Caller Logon ID: -
Caller Process ID: -
Transited Services: -
Source Network Address: 10.12.13.35
Source Port: 1708
Impersonation is set to true and the username and password are blank. It is using the ASPNET account on the remote IIS server.
If it is an identity problem, you could try setting your IIS 5.1 application to use Integrated Windows Authentication, and then add the following to you web.config on your IIS5.1 web site under system.web to enable impersonation.
<identity impersonate="true"/>
<authentication mode="Windows" />
Since this is an ASP.NET application, it runs in an Application Pool of IIS. This Application Pool runs using a specific user("Local System", "Network Service" or another user).
Does this user have enough rights to connect to a remote server ?
See MSDN for more info.
This looks like it may be a double-hop issue. If you are impersonating the current user of a website using NTLM, that impersonation is only valid on that server (your IIS 5.1 server in this case). If you try to connect to another server using the web site, you are actually going to have issues as it cannot pass the token to another server that was used during impersonation. The same is true if you are debugging your site through your machine, going to another box. Your local machine is authenticating you, but it cannot impersonate you to another server.
All of the solutions I have used in the past require you to hard code the app pool to use an account that has permissions, set the annony. account to a domain account with permissions on the other machine, or use a windows service running on the IIS 5.1 machine, under a domain account, to connect to the other server.
If you are using Kerberos, this wouldn't apply, but AD uses NTLM by default.
Where exactly are you trying to read too? Is it in under the same path as your application?
When I had this problem, I found that simply authenticating my self on a Windows file share solved the problem. From experience, I think that WMI/ADSI/COM doesn't have great support for not-already-authenticated users. I believe this issue occurs when you're not associated with a Windows domain.
If it is indeed a NTLM doublehop issue you could use the SETSPN utility to create service principal named instances for your target IIS servers.
Then you could go into Active Directory, and then allow the computer object (basically the NETWORK SERVICE or LOCAL SERVICE principals) to delegate its credentials to a correctly registered SPN.
Then you could hop-hop-hop all over the place! But, be warned! People can hurt themselves on sharp pointy things when you enable double-hop!
Good KB articles to read:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929650
I believe that DirectoryEntry.Exists silently ignores any credentials supplied and uses the creds of the authenticated user. This seems to match the behaviour you've described. For AD work, we never use it for this reason.
I'm sort of stumped at the moment as to why you can't get this working. There is a temporary work around you could try. When instantiating the DirectoryEntry object you could use one of the following constructor overloads:
public DirectoryEntry(
string path,
string username,
string password
)
Documented at: MSDN: DirectoryEntry Constructor (String, String, String)
...or...
public DirectoryEntry(
string path,
string username,
string password,
AuthenticationTypes authenticationType
)
Documented at: MSDN: DirectoryEntry Constructor (String, String, String, AuthenticationTypes)
As it happens I'm building a test AD environment on my virtual server box for a new project to do similar stuff. When I get it up and running I'll have a play around to see if I can reproduce the problem you're encountering. In the meantime let us know what happens if you try these constructor overloads referenced above.
Update (In answer to Michaels comment):
For reasons that evade me just now, we couldn't use DirectoryEntry.Exists() in a particular scenario, there is this snippet of code that gets called now and again in one of our apps:
public static bool MetabasePathExists(string metabasePath)
{
try
{
using(DirectoryEntry site = new DirectoryEntry(metabasePath))
{
if(site.Name != String.Empty)
{
return true;
}
return false;
}
}
catch(COMException ex)
{
if(ex.Message.StartsWith("The system cannot find the path specified"))
{
return false;
}
LogError(ex, String.Format("metabasePath={0}", metabasePath));
throw;
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
LogError(ex, String.Format("metabasePath={0}", metabasePath));
throw;
}
}
You could replace the constructor with one of the ones from above. Admittedly it's a stab in the dark :).
Related
I have the following code snippet to test a plain-text username/password against the AD, which works fine if I hit F5 in visual studio and try it via the WCFTestClient, but once I deploy to IIS and try the same function, it will never return true for ValidCredentials; is there something security wise that needs to be set for the Identity that the Application Pool runs under?
I tried setting the App Pool identity to my own account (domain admin) just to test if this was the problem, but that didn't help either, so I'm a bit lost as to how to fix this.
The site (Custom API) has anonymous access set up.
try
{
// create a "principal context" - e.g. your domain (could be machine, too)
using (PrincipalContext pc = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, DomainName))
{
// validate the credentials
if (pc.ValidateCredentials(UserName, Password))
{
IsValid = true;
break;
}
}
}
catch (Exception)
{
LoggingControler.LogWarning(null, "Unreachable Domain: " + Domain);
}
I've gone over things again, and it's all due to Rights in Windows. Network Service somehow doesn't have enough rights to execute PrincipalContext.ValidateCredentials. If I change the Application Pool Identity to the identity of a Domain Administrator, the code works.
If someone can tell me how to set up a Limited User account with the proper rights to execute PrincipalContext.ValidateCredentials, I can finish this.
Ok, I've finally found my own answer via https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5140377/query-activedirectory-sometimes-not-working-asp-net-c and https://elgg.leeds.ac.uk/webteam/weblog/15385.html
As I've discovered, "Network Service" application pool identity holds the key to this problem...
Adding the read rights didn't work; so there's still something else wrong.
Did you enable Windows Authentication in IIS
We have 2 web-servers which are theoretically identical, but are producing different results when performing an AzMan authorisation check.
We have the same web-site running on both machines (literally the same web-site - it's been XCOPYed from one to the other, and it runs under the same service account). All this web-site does is perform an authorisation check against an AzMan database (sitting on a separate SQL server).
However, on the working web-site (WebA) this check returns 0 (i.e. "user is authorised"), while on the broken web-site (WebB) this check returns 5 (i.e. "user is NOT authorised"). We are expecting 0 on both web-sites. The same user is accessing both web-sites, from the same PC.
Does anyone have any ideas for things we can check?
Environment details
Windows Server 2008 R2
Same AD domain
IIS 7.5
.NET 3.5
AzMan Database runs on SQL Server 2005/Windows Server 2008 R2.
Code
AzAuthorizationStoreClass authStore = new AzAuthorizationStoreClass();
// initialise the store
authStore.Initialize(0, "mssql://Driver={SQL Server};Server={OURDBSERVER};Trusted_Connection={Yes};/OURDATABASE/OURAPPLICATION", null);
// open the store
IAzApplication2 authApp = authStore.OpenApplication2("OURAPPLICATION", null);
// get the identity of the user NOT the service account
WindowsIdentity identity = Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity as WindowsIdentity;
// and from that derive the token
ulong userToken = (ulong)identity.Token.ToInt64();
// get the context based on the token
IAzClientContext3 clientContext =
(IAzClientContext3)authApp.InitializeClientContextFromToken(userToken, null);
// get the operation object based on the id
IAzOperation2 azManOperation = (IAzOperation2)authApp.OpenOperation(operationId, null);
// generate an audit identifier
string auditIdentifer =
string.Format("{0}{1} : O:{2}", "{the_correct_id}", identity.Name, operationId);
uint accessResult = clientContext.AccessCheck2(auditIdentifer, string.Empty, azManOperation.OperationID);
return accessResult.ToString();
Many thanks,
RB.
Thanks to David Hall for pointing me in the right direction.
Investigation showed that both web-sites were enabled for both Windows authentication and anonymous access. However, on one web-site the user was being logged in correctly, while on the broken web-site it was falling back to anonymous mode.
Disabling anonymous access fixed this problem by ensuring the user logs in to both web-sites.
However, this leaves another question of why the browser logs in anonymously on one web-site but not the other - one for ServerFault I think.
In our case, we were using ASP.NET impersonation with Windows Authentication and not Anonymous. Tt was working on the Windows 7 Enterprise x64 Development machine and not on the Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 test server. Both Application Pools were set up exactly the same with the same domain account credentials.
It turns out that ASP.NET impersonation was the root cause of the issue. After disabling ASP.NET impersonation, the App Pool account was now being used as the credentials to connect to the AzMan store successfully. The same issue was occurring when connecting to an AzMan store in Active Directory or SQL Server.
For clarity, the error I was getting was: Value does not fall within the expected range. from AzAuthorizationStoreClass.Initialize()
My final connection string was:
<add name="AzPolicyStore" connectionString="mssql://Driver={SQL
Server};Server=sqlserver\instance;/DatabaseName/AzStore" />
I created a Windows Service which Access File from Remote Machine. but It gives error in Log file that File Does Not Exist.When i deployed it then and then only it gives error otherwise when i am debugging from Visual Studio 2005 then it is working fine.
I tried to change Properties of Service from Log On tab. gives Logon as: then choose this Account and Gives Name of Remote Machine and Password Still it is not working. Please Help me out.
Code:
if (File.Exists(FileName))
{
}
else
{
Log.append("File Not Exist Path=:" + FileName, 75);
}
Error:
File Not Exist Path=: \Computer-01\Trend Till_04Feb\Trend Till_04Feb\TREND\128.DBF
I assume you are using ServiceProcessInstaller and ServiceInstaller.
The most important property is Account within the ServiceProcessInstaller class. It specifies the Windows account under which the service runs (security context). The following options are available:
LocalService: Service presents the computer's credentials to remote servers.
LocalSystem: Service presents anonymous credentials to remote servers.
NetworkService: Service has limited local privileges and presents the computer's credentials to remote servers.
User: A local or network account is specified. You may specify the necessary username and password via properties, or you may type them during installation. The Service uses the security context of the specified user account.
Following three options are provided to specify how your service is started.
Manual :- The user starts the service.
Automatic :- The service starts automatically when the system starts.
Disabled :- The service is not available for use.
Go to Properties of ServiceInstaller object and set ServiceName and StartType to Automatic.
Go to Properties of ServiceProcessInstaller and set Account property to LocalService. This causes the service to run on local service account.
HTH
I have a small C# solution used to check users credentials. It works fine for two of my teammates, but on my PC I get an exception.
The relevant code:
PrincipalContext context = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain);
if (context.ValidateCredentials(System.Environment.UserDomainName + "\\" + usr, pwd))
return true;
else
return false;
And the exception is:
DirectoryOperationException, "The server cannot handle directory requests.".
I tried creating context with the explicit server name and the 636 port number, but this didn't help as well.
Any ideas?
I had this problem too using IIS Express and VS 2010. What fixed it for me was a comment on another thread.
Validate a username and password against Active Directory?
but i'll save you the click and search... :) Just add ContextOpations.Negotiate to you Validate Credentials call like below.
bool valid = context.ValidateCredentials(user, pass, ***ContextOptions.Negotiate***);
I had this issue: things were working on my dev machine but didn't work on the server. Turned out that IIS on the server was set up to run as LocalMachine. I changed it to NetworkService (the default) and things started working.
So basically check the user of the app pool if this is running on IIS.
I had to just create a new app pool and assign it .NET 2.0, then assign the new app pool to our web app, and it started working. We had .NET 3.5 SP2, so the hotfix wasn't ideal for us. Since the WWW service is usually Local System, I questioned that too. But since it was .NET and security related, I gave a shot at the app pool first and it worked.
Perhaps you need the hotfix?
FIX: DirectoryOperationException exception
And you are an Admin or the id that your service is running under is an Admin on your PC right?
I take it you already looked into this:
System.DirectoryServices.Protocols
"You may receive a less than helpful DirectoryOperationException(“The server cannot handle directory requests.”) what isn’t quite so amusing about this is that it didn’t even try to communicate with the server. The solution was to add the port number to the server. So instead of passing “Server” to open the LdapConnection, I passed “server:636”. By the way, LDAPS is port 636 – rather than the 389 port used by LDAP."
Good point, I wouldn't expect that Win7/.NET 3.5 would need that patch. How about the info provided in this question:
Setting user's password via System.DirectoryServices.Protocols in AD 2008 R2
Apologies in advance as I haven't had much experience with directories before.
I have an ASP.net application, and I have to validate its users against an Active Directory Application Mode instance running on Server 2k3. I was previously attempting a connection with DirectoryEntry and catching the COMException if the user's credentials (userPrincipalName & password) were wrong, but I had a number of problems when trying to bind as users who weren't a member of any ADAM groups (which is a requirement).
I recently found the System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement library, which seems a lot more promising, but although it works on my local machine, I'm having some troubles when testing this in our testbed environment. Chances are I'm simply misunderstanding how to use these objects correctly, as I wasn't able to find any great documentation on the matter. Currently I am creating a PrincipalContext with a Windows username and password, then calling the AuthenticateCredentials with the user's userPrincipalName and password. Here's a very short exert of what I'm doing:
using (var serviceContext = new PrincipalContext(
ContextType.ApplicationDirectory,
serverAddress,
rootContainer,
ContextOptions.Negotiate | ContextOptions.SecureSocketLayer,
serviceAccountUsername,
serviceAccountPassword)) {
bool credentialsValid = serviceContext.ValidateCredentials(userID, password, ContextOptions.SecureSocketLayer | ContextOptions.SimpleBind)
}
If the user's credentials are valid, I then go on to perform other operations with that principal context. As I said, this works for both users with and without roles in my own environment, but not in our testbed environment. My old DirectoryEntry way of checking the user's credentials still works with the same configuration.
After a very long morning, I was able to figure out the problem!
The exception message I was receiving when calling ValidateCredentials was extremely vague. After installing Visual Studio 2008 in the test environment (which is on the other side of the country, mind you!), I was able to debug and retrieve the HRESULT of the error. After some very deep searching in to Google, I found some very vague comments about "SSL Warnings" being picked up as other exceptions, and that enabling "SCHANNEL logging" (which I'm very unfamiliar with!) might reveal some more insight. So, after switching that on in the registry and retrying the connection, I was presented with this:
The certificate received from the remote server does not contain the expected name. It is therefore not possible to determine whether we are connecting to the correct server. The server name we were expecting is ADAMServer. The SSL connection request has failed. The attached data contains the server certificate.
I found this rather strange, as the old method of connecting via SSL worked fine. In any case, my co-worker was able to spot the problem - the name on the SSL certificate that had been issued on the server was that of the DNS name ("adam2.net") and not the host name ("adamserver"). Although I'm told that's the norm, it just wasn't resolving the correct name when using PrincipalContext.
Long story short; re-issuing a certificate with the computer name and not the DNS name fixed the problem!