random authentication errors with IIS 6 and NTLM?

Hi,

I have an intranet server set up on W2K03/IIS 6 (regular ASP and
ASP.NET) which normally works fine with NTLM authentication. This
morning, users would log in, then be unable to access some pages.
Clicking on a link would send a request from the browser, which would
then sit there spinning waiting for a server response.

Log files show what looks like pairs of responses with 401.2 followed
by 401.1 unauthorized errors.

I did a trace and saw the following:
client makes request
server responds 401 unauthorized
client makes request with NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE
server responsds 401 unauthorized, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE
client makes request with NTLMSSP_AUTH

Normally at this point I'd expect the server to respond200/OK, but that
never got sent in the exchanges which were failing. The server would
send an ACK, and then just close the connection.

While I was trying to track down what was happening, the server started
working again. ??

Does anyone have any ideas what is going on here?

thanks,
Steph

Did you somehow configure IIS to disallow KeepAlive? It would result in this
behavior.

--
//David
IIS
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
//
"Steph" <steph.bridges DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1109348435.009507.10630@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
Hi,

I have an intranet server set up on W2K03/IIS 6 (regular ASP and
ASP.NET) which normally works fine with NTLM authentication. This
morning, users would log in, then be unable to access some pages.
Clicking on a link would send a request from the browser, which would
then sit there spinning waiting for a server response.

Log files show what looks like pairs of responses with 401.2 followed
by 401.1 unauthorized errors.

I did a trace and saw the following:
client makes request
server responds 401 unauthorized
client makes request with NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE
server responsds 401 unauthorized, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE
client makes request with NTLMSSP_AUTH

Normally at this point I'd expect the server to respond200/OK, but that
never got sent in the exchanges which were failing. The server would
send an ACK, and then just close the connection.

While I was trying to track down what was happening, the server started
working again. ??

Does anyone have any ideas what is going on here?

thanks,
Steph