403 Forbidden errors w/ windows authentication

From: John (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 02/24/04 

Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 09:26:08 -0800

Hello,

I am developing a intranet application in an all Windows environment, but I'm running into a authentication snag. I use Windows Integrated Security on the web server so that I can identify who the user is. I do this with these lines.

            Dim objContext As System.Web.HttpContext = System.Web.HttpContext.Current
            sLanId = objContext.User.Identity.Name()

Where sLanId contains the <domain name>\<user name> string. I am not using impersonation. This works just fine on my development server (which resides in a different domain than my computer).

The problem is when we moved the application to a test/staging servers in a third domain, we continually get a "403 Forbidden" error, even though the domain trusts are in place. The one difference is that the test/staging environment is load-balanced across two servers. Has anyone seen this? Is there a .NET policy that needs to be created?

As far as I understand, a 403 error states that IIS has rejected the request. If there were NTFS permissions that were incorrect, I would have seen a 401 error, so I'm fairly confident the file permissions are not causing this.

If you need further info, I can provide, but I'm pretty stumped. I've never had Windows integrated security not authenticate in a homogenous environment such as this.

Thanks,
John