Skip to main content

What should I do when on Azure Web Role I get "HTTP Error 401.2 - Unauthorized. You are not authorized to view this page due to invalid authentication headers"

By
This post is dedicated to a simple but annoying issue that can appear when you are developing a ASP.NET MVC Application.
When I run my web application on my local machine, directly from Visual Studio, my web sites works perfectly. When I deploy it on a Web Role I get "HTTP Error 401.2 - Unauthorized. You are not authorized to view this page due to invalid authentication headers"
The same problem can appears if you deploy on on-premises servers, but in general this problem pop-ups on Web Roles. Not because a web role is different (it has the same layers as a web server -OS and IIS), but because people that are working with cloud solutions forget about infrastructure layers.

If we are reading the error message we can identify some possible root causes. But basically it seems that the user that is trying to access the page is not authorized.
But why it is working on the development machine from Visual Studio? Simple, in general the developer is also the admin on the machine and he access the page as an administrator and has full access.
On the local machine this can be replicated easily if you deploy the web site on your local IIS and play a little with the user that access the web site.



If you will not set this value, the value that is set in IIS will be used by default. For web roles, by default IIS is 'closed', it means that it is not open for anonymous access and you need to specify if you want to allow anonymous users to access your website.
Based on what Visual Studio template you are using to create your web site, the value could be set by default to true or not.

To allow anonymous users to access your web site you need to do the following things in the configuration file (web.config):
<system.web>
     <authorization>
          <allow users="*" />
     </authorization>
</system.web>
...
<system.webServer>
     <security>
          <authorization>
               <add accessType="Allow" users="?" />
          </authorization>
     </security>
</system.webServer>
The above configuration disables all authentication mechanisms and allows anonymous users to access your site.

For HTTP error code 401.2 on Web Roles I observed that this is the most common problem.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

By
In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can User Technical Profile Influence AI Architecture Decisions?

By
In the last few days, I ran a small experiment on Devin/Windsurf/Cascade, BMAD, and LLM-based architecture decisions. The initial concern was simple: if an AI coding assistant knows something about the user, for example, that the user is a Java developer or a .NET developer, can this information influence the architecture and technology stack that the AI will propose? This question is important because many companies are starting to use AI tools not only for coding but also for product discovery, architecture, documentation, and technical decision-making. If the AI is influenced by the developer's personal profile, the result may not be fully neutral. It may look like a business or architecture decision, but in reality, it may be partially shaped by the context of the person using the tool. The test was done using BMAD with Devin/Windsurf/Cascade. The scenario was a unified field service operations platform. The task was to let BMAD refine the product, define the architecture and s...
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...
8 comments
Read more