Archive for the Category SharePoint V3

 
 

Unable to Authenticate to Local Site? Disable Loopback Check

This one never gets old. Everytime we want to install SharePoint, we tend to continue to work on the server getting as much done as possible. And, everytime, we’re confronted with the inability to authenticate using Windows username and password and a browser on the web front end server.

You try so carefully to enter your DomainName\UserName and password exactly correctly and hit enter, enter, enter and you get a 401 or, worse, just a blank screen. As we’ve learned, what we’ve encountered is the dreaded anti-loopback monster.

Now, the ALM is a fine security measure on a server that you deploy and then spend the rest of your life as a SharePoint admin working from another workstation. It simply prevents authentication from the local machine using host headers other than the machine name. It’s detailed here on support.microsoft.com. Apparetly the threat is a “Reflection Attack” which reminds me of my mirror on the occasional Sunday morning before my shower.

Essentially, we’re creating a two registry keys:

  1. DisableLoopbackCheck dword registry key with a decimal value of 1 in the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrrentControlSet\Control\Lsa hive. 
  2. DisableStrictNameChecking dword registry key with a decimal value of 1 in the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrrentControlSet\Services\
    LanMan
    Server\Parameters hive.

Once we restart, we should be able to access our sites locally using the propery credentials. Of course, this is a “must have” kind of thing if you’re building a development box where you’ll be accessing the WFE from the local machine in Visual Studio.

hth
-robot

Document Locked Mystery

I don’t know if our new best friend, Paul, is a meddlesome teenager but he has helped with the mysterious file locking problems with SPv3 version control.

This process is so troublesome that I’ve known may customer that simply deactivate it by default. What happens is that you try to open a document for editing and you can’t because it’s “locked.”

Paul first goes into detail here and follows up with a companion article here.

For his efforts, Scooby says he’d be glad to share his Scooby Snax.

-robot