Logon Prompt Required to Access IIS6 Site - Solved

From: Mark Olbert (no email)
Date: 06/13/05 

Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 16:00:17 -0700

I'm posting this to save some other poor sod the pain I went through...

I have IIS6 running on WinServer2003 SP1. I moved over several existing websites from an IIS5.1 box
running Win2K SP4 by copying the directories, and then using the New Website wizard in IIS6 to
create the websites.

You can imagine my surprise when I was forced to log in to the sites in order to view them over my
LAN. Call me naive, but I >>thought<< the point of writing a webserver was to... serve up web pages.

After much troubleshooting, I determined that the problem involved the default account used by IIS6
to support anonymous access, IUSR_<machine_name>. I suspected this might be a problem because I'm
running IIS6 on a domain controller.

Deleting the IUSR_<machine_name> and IWAM_<machine_name> accounts and rebooting the server solved
the problem (albeit at the price of introducing some new problems that I'm resolving). IIS6 noticed
that the ISUR_ and IWAM_ accounts were missing, and set itself to work with
<domain>\IUSR_<machine_name> and <domain>\IWAM_<machine_name> instead.

So now my webserver actually serves up webpages!

And to think, it only took three hours to do it! Now, httpd from apache would've been up and running
in, oh, 45 minutes, counting a full compile from source code, but hey, it's open source software and
hence no good :).

Now if I can only figure out how to get the SceCLI subsystem to stop gacking over the missing IUSR_
and IWAM_ accounts, I'll be all set.

Until the next security patch, at least.

- Mark

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