One thing I want to start doing with this website is posting a little on software development. I sometimes figure out difficult problems as a software developer and want to remember them or just put them out there for other people to find. A rather vague and not well documented problem I ran in to while deploying a Microsoft Silverlight client based application’s ASP.NET website was a configuration issue having to do with the server’s permissions. When testing the connection for the new application I got a “cannot verify access to path” warning in the “Add Application” dialog. It also gave me the following longer explanation:
The server is configured to use pass-through authentication with a built-in account to access the specified physical path. However, IIS Manager cannot verify whether the built-in account has access. Make sure that the application pool identity has Read access to the physical path. If this server is joined to a domain, and the application pool identity is NetworkService or LocalSystem, verify that <domain>\<computer_name>$ has Read access to the physical path. Then test these settings again.
It still let me setup the website but when I browsed to it I got a different exception from the website. It was giving me unauthorized exceptions. “Access is denied”. It was confusing as I’ve setup websites in the same manner before on the same box and I’m an Administrator. I started comparing configurations and permissions on this application with another similar application until I discovered that the only difference was in the Advanced screen found through the Security tab of the website folder’s properties. The owner name had been set to my name where as typically it was set to the “System” or just the “Administrators” group of the server. I changed this and everything worked. Very confusing and I wish I could identify what in my process was different from the dozens of other times I’ve setup websites.
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