Infralution Support

[hypehuman]

I'm using ILS 5.10.1.0 on an Azure Website. My application reauthenticates every time it starts up. It works in most cases, but when installed on a particular Virtual Machine, it doesn't authenticate; instead it encounters an HTTP 403 error in WPF.AuthenticationService.AuthenticationService.Authenticate(String, String, Byte[]).

First of all, is this a known issue? Is there a fix, and will upgrading to 5.11.1 get rid of it?

Otherwise, I assume I'll need to debug it on the server side. What would be the best way to go about this with VS 2010? I did some research and found a couple options:
- Get the ILS server source code, compile it with IntelliTrace enabled, and deploy it to a new Azure Website for debugging
- Upgrade to VS 2013 and enable Remote Debugging

[Infralution]

This is not a known issue - it sounds like it may be an issue with your web server.

Does the error happen every time on the particular virtual machine?

Does the same error occur if you try and authenticate/install a key on that machine?

What operating system is the virtual machine running?
_________________
Infralution Support

[hypehuman]

It usually works on that VM, but there were two periods yesterday where, for a few hours, we got that 403 error whenever we tried to authenticate or install a new license. During those times, other machines were working normally.

The VM uses Windows 7 Enterprise, SP 1.

[Infralution]

That's strange because the 403 error is typically a permissions issue (See http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E403.html) which would be server related. So the fact that it is only occurring on one computer is strange. Does your main website use ASP.NET authentication to control access to the site?
_________________
Infralution Support

[hypehuman]

Yes, it's baffling. It's happening again today. It only occurs for customers on a particular network accessing a particular product within our authentication server. If they switch to another network, or try to authenticate a different product on the same server, it works fine.

[Infralution]

So on one machine you can authenticate one product but not another - but on other machines you can authenticate both products? And this is consistently repeatable for that period of time?

The only explanation I could think for that behaviour is that you have a firewall/anti-virus product running on that machine that for some reason is blocking internet access for one application but not the other.
_________________
Infralution Support

[hypehuman]

Please scratch the part about the products: both were acting the same way.

It did indeed turn out to be a firewall issue. We were using the url http://[ourproductname].azurewebsites.net. The website was blocked because of "Web Hosting". The strange thing is that the access behaves differently in a browser and from my application:
- Browser: http://[ourproductname].azurewebsites.net/[any subdirectory] is always blocked
- Application: usually works, but sometimes stops working for hours at a time

So I guess their security software must be somehow treating HTTP and SOAP requests differently, or maybe they have consistent security software built into their browsers and buggy software for the whole network.

Fix: I added added a DNS entry to my own domain so that the authentication URL doesn't contain "azurewebsites.net" anymore.

[Infralution]

Thanks for letting us know. I guess because it was intermittent it might have looked like it was working on one product and not another.
_________________
Infralution Support