Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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IIS, basic authentication, permissions and include file

Occasionally I have a problem to solve that burns some serious time and makes me doubt my ability in my chosen field, and this was one of them until a “eureka” moment a few minutes ago..

I had been struggling with using basic authentication (over https) with IIS to lock down access to a particular (classic) asp script. Not really an expert in windows permissions, I had been trying all sorts of combinations of folder and file permissions to get this to work, but I was getting a permission denied error whenever I tried to login using an account I had set up. After far too long and realising that I could get it to work with a plain text file, but not my asp file, I realised that my asp script had a load of include files which sat in a different folder, and I needed to give execute permissions for my trusted user to these too.

If only it hadn’t taken me something like eight hours to work that out, I might just be in bed now!