Authenticated Users Cannot Query Secured Documents

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Index Server versions 1.1 and 2.0

SYMPTOMS

If the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is configured to allow Anonymous access and either Basic authentication or Microsoft Windows NT Challenge Response authentication, and it contains both a secured virtual directory and an authentication virtual directory, one of the following may occur:

• You can authenticate against a secure HTML query page and perform the query, but only the documents in the unsecured directory are returned as a result of the query.

• You can authenticate against a secure HTML query page and retrieve the documents from a secured directory, but for a certain period of time, you can only retrieve unsecured documents.

CAUSE

If the Anonymous user has access to the .IDQ file, then the browser does not pass the authentication header along with the GET or POST. This causes the .IDQ file to be run in the context of the anonymous user account. Running the .IDQ file in the Anonymous user’s context only allows the unsecured documents to be retrieved.

NOTE: If you are using ASP files to query in Index Server 2.0, the ASP files also need to be secured.

WORKAROUND

Create a separate .IDQ file for the authenticated users and remove the Anonymous user account from the Windows NT NTFS file permissions of that file. This will cause the browser to send the authentication header with the GET or the POST, ensuring that the Index Server can identify who is logged on. Once the Index Server knows who is logged on, then you can retrieve secured documents reliably.

Keywords          : indxsecurity kbgeneral
Version           : WINNT: 1.1,2.0
Platform          : winnt
Hardware          : ALPHA x86
Issue type        : kbprb
Solution Type     : kbworkaround