Thursday 30 April 2009

Can't Crawl Sites, Can't Access Sites on Server 401.1 Access Denied

I hit this nasty problem recently.

I could access central admin fine on http://servername:port but when trying to crawl sites locally, the crawler failed on sites with a custom host header, returning access denied messages. That's strange I thought, so launched up IE on the server and tried to access the sites, get prompted to login 3 times then boom access denied 401.1. These same sites work just fine when accessed on other client machines in the network.

Something definetly aint right here!!!

Luckily Todd Klindt saved the day for me, he blogs this issue nicely here. Further to that Ishai Sagi also has a blog post on it. So have a read of those awesome blog posts and then check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 for a resolution, the cause is stated in the hotfix as:

"A loopback check security feature that is designed to help prevent reflection attacks on your computer. Therefore, authentication fails if the FQDN or the custom host header that you use does not match the local computer name."

The resolution involes a little bit of regedit.

Phew disaster averted!

Perth SharePoint User Group Lead

I am the new Lead of the Perth SharePoint User Group !

http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Perth/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=23

Rick Rosato of Connected Systems resurrected the Perth SharePoint User Group in early 2007 and has done a great job of running the user group since then, we’ve had some great sessions in the last two years and many people have benefitted from the user group. Rick has decided to hand over the presidency to me so he can focus on other things, and I gladly accept the position and all the responsibility that it entails – cheers Rick !

Recent Meetings & Presentations

Late last month, on the 25th March Jeremy Thake of Readify presented an excellent talk on unit testing in SharePoint, check out the webcast here.

For this months meeting, on the 21st April, the infamous Paul Culmsee of Seven Sigma Business Solutions graced the Perth SharePoint User Group as a speaker for the very first time, to present a talk on "Wicked Problems and SharePoint - Rethinking the Approach" you can view the presentation slides on Paul's blog.


If you are based in Perth and working with SharePoint, you've got to come along to our meetings!

Check out the user group website regularly for up and coming events. If you are keen on sharing your SharePoint adventures with others, get in contact with me, as we need speakers! We'll slot you in as a presenter so you can share your experiences with the community.