My 2p about ERP Solutions, Information Worker Solutions and other software products (mainly Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft SharePoint).

13 February 2009

SharePoint not reachable through Internet Explorer, with Firefox no problem

by Patrik Luca 27 comments

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Problem description: Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

At one of my customers, all of a sudden, the SharePoint website was not accessible anymore for some users. Those users were prompted for their credentials when trying to enter the SharePoint website, but then they got immediately a Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage error page. The SharePoint environment was a MOSS 2007 environment with Windows Authentication.

Solution: set Authenticated access to Basic authentication

As not all of my users had experienced this problem (some were still able to enter their credentials and enter the SharePoint environment), my first thought was that it had something to do with their settings of Internet Explorer (like the site not being in their trusted sites etcetera).

So I did some tests and came to these findings:

  • Everyone was able to enter the SharePoint environment if they used as browser Mozilla Firefox. Once users were browsing with Internet Explorer, some were not able anymore to enter the SharePoint environment (although they could reach it for sure, as they were asked for their credentials).
  • Users surfing with Internet Explorer 6 on a non-Vista PC experienced no problems.
  • Users surfing with Internet Explorer 7 on a Vista PC didn’t get past the credential prompt.

So obviously it had something to do with the credentials (username and password) not getting passed through to Active Directory or back.

I started looking in the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and found an interesting setting to change.

I unchecked the Integrated Windows authentication box (which was checked) and checked the Basic authentication box (which was unchecked): after a iisreset, every single user on whatever operating system with whatever browser was now again able to get past the credentials prompt and enter the SharePoint environment.

These settings can be found in your IIS Manager by right-clicking on your SharePoint web application in IIS, then choose Properties, next go to the Directory Security tab and choose Edit in the Authentication and access control section.

Comments 27 comments
Anonymous said...

hi Patrik,
by any chance, did you have SSL enabled?

This can also cause for problems on vista/IE7

Patrik Luca said...

SSL 3.0 was enabled, SSL 2.0 wasn't.

Anonymous said...

Hi Patrik,

I was trying to install a MOSS Server Farm for last 2/3 weeks in VM instance. After the successfully installtion MOSS, when I try to open the Central Admin site, the IE was immeditaly getting hanged. But the site was working fine in Firefox 2.0.

As per your suggestion I changed the IIS setting for CA site from integrated to basic. And everything started working...Thanks for this tip..

But what could be the problem with integrated security settings..this should work..

Patrik Luca said...

IMHO it should work. But I don't know what to configure exactly to make it work. So my solution to work with basic authentication is kind of a workaround until somebody is able to explain me how to configure it to make SharePoint work with integrated security. So I am afraid I can't help you further in this.

San said...

Just some update on this issues that I pointed out on 27-Mar..this integrated windows authetication & IE problem occurs only if I access the system(where MOSS is installed) using remote login
, But if login directly to the system where MOSS is installed it works fine ..no issue. So if I remote login to the system then ...I can login to the sharepoint site only if I change the site authentication to Basic Authentication in IIS.

U also had the same issue?

Patrik Luca said...

Indeed: browsing to SharePoint on the system where MOSS is installed, worked fine for me too.

amit said...

Thanks man,

It really work for me...

Patrik Luca said...

Glad to hear Amit that this post could help you out.

Anonymous said...

You most likey do not have kerberos configured properly...

Do you have you SPNs set?

Have you given proper access in component services for local activation and such...

See this...
http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2007/04/23/configuring-kerberos-for-sharepoint-2007-part-1-base-configuration-for-sharepoint.aspx

Kevin said...

Changing authentication was not what worked for me.

What I discovered was that the following permission had been turned off on the 'Read' permission set.

Browse Directories - Enumerate files and folders in a Web site using SharePoint Designer and Web DAV interfaces.

Enabling that specific permission resolved the problem for me. Something to do with Outlook/IE integration I suspect.

Kevin

Anonymous said...

Man You rock!!! Saved me 2 days time !!!

Bo said...

Is there any way to set this up to work without using Basic Authentication? In a business environment, sending passwords in plain text is a big no-no, but that seems to be the only way to get the site working properly through IE.

Patrik Luca said...

It's the only solution I found Bo: if you find another one, I would be happy to hear it!

Bo said...

I figured it out for the inquiring minds who may want to know. I went into Internet Option on Internet Explorer and to the Advanced tab. Scroll down to Security and uncheck "Use Windows Authentication Protocol" (or something similar to that). It'll now pass the information from the current AD login over to your Sharepoint server.

I noticed this when trying to log in, I saw the logs said it was trying to use Kerberos to authenticate when using IE, but NTLM when using anything else. I thought about using the Adsutil.vbs on IIS to set it to NTLM only, but I was afraid it would break it. After snooping around a bit, I found this setting and it works great. Enjoy!

Patrik Luca said...

Thanks for sharing this information Bo!

Anonymous said...

thanks very much, it solved me problem....

Unknown said...

Hi all. I have the same problem with IE, but only when users try to access sharepoint externally. If they are in the internal network, works fine. I tried setting sharepoint as a trusted site instead of intranet site--but that didn't work. Users can access sharepoint fine externally from Firefox. Any ideas?

Rahat said...

In my case I found that the prefix of the username was causing the problem. For any other browser the username worked. But for IE6 I had to use like this: [machine name]\[username] and it worked!

Anonymous said...

Just ran into this on SP2010.

Didn't like leaving it as Basic Authentication so kept looking, in the Advance Settings option for Windows Authentication there's a tick box for Enable Kernel-mode authentication, mine was unticked. Ticking it and clicking OK allowed IE to access the site successfully.

Unknown said...

Hi folks,

We have a similar scenario where from some particular PCs:
-Cannot ping to the SharePoint server
-Cannot browse to sharepoint using IE
-But can browse to sharepoint using Firefox

however this happens intermittently at different times on the same PC (while at other times it works fine).

Do you think the Windows Authentication setting would be a possible cause in this situation?

thanks

Anonymous said...

Also a similar problem with SP2010 on 2008 server. In my case, I had two separate servers and was able to compare some settings. This article led me to the authentication issue, but what I noticed different:

In Windows Authentication, the server with this problem was missing the "Negotiate" item under Providers (listed before NTLM). Once I added this, IE worked again.

Bijay Kumar said...

http://www.onlysharepoint2010.com/2011/08/internet-explorer-cannot-display.html

check the URL may be helpful.

Unknown said...

Hi, I am having a similar kind of issue. My site is in SharePoint 2007 and it has form based authentication.
In my case if i login through firefox it works, if acess from inside the server it works. but using IE in client mechine it never opens. I have checked with HttpAnalizer and found there there is loop between the custom login.aspx and the authenticate.aspx page. similar kind of setup is working fine in other server,
I am clue less regarding this issue. Any help..???

Vedang Purohit said...

Thanks Man! It really helped.

Omar Siller said...

Thanks for this solution, it worked for me

Anonymous said...

I know this is an old post, but I thought I would add a note.

Try resetting your browser back to default.

One day, all of a sudden, I couldn't access central administration anymore throw an ie9 browser. It coincidently happened right after I tried uninstalling a webpart. It worked in Firefox, but not in ie. Although, I was still able to access the main sharepoint site through ie. I tried all of the above and it didn't work. Resetting the browser worked.

Anonymous said...

terrible advice. it says right there, passwords sent in clear text. garbage

Patrik Luca, Ieper, BELGIUM
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