We have our servers at the server farm in a domain. Let's call it LIVE.

Our developer computers live in a completely separate corporate domain, miles and miles away. Let's call it CORP.

We have a large central storage unit (unix) that houses images and other media needed by many webservers in the server farm. The IIS application pools run as (let's say) LIVE\MediaUser and use those credentials to connect to a central storage share as a virtual directory, retrieve the images, and serve them as if they were local on each server.

The problem is in development.

On my development machine. I log in as CORP\MyName. My IIS 6 application pool runs as Network Service. I can't run it as a user from the LIVE domain because my machine isn't (and can not be) joined to that domain.

I try to create a virtual directory, point it to the same network directory, click Connect As, uncheck the "Always use the authenticated user's credentials when validating access to the network directory" checkbox so that I can enter the login info, enter the credentails for LIVE\MediaUser, click OK, verify the password, etc.

This doesn't work. I get "HTTP Error 500 - Internal server error" from IIS.

The IIS log file reports sc-status = 500, sc-substatus = 16, and sc-win32-status = 1326.

The documentation says this means "UNC authorization credentials are incorrect" and the Win32 status means "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password."

This would be all and good if it were anywhere close to accurate. I double- and trouble-checked it. Tried multiple known good logins. The IIS manager allows me to view the file tree in its window, it's only the browser that kicks me out.

I even tried going to the virtual directory's Directory Security tab, and under Authentication and Access Control, I tried using the same LIVE domain username for the anonymous access credential. No luck.

I'm not trying to run any ASP, ASP.NET, or other dynamic anything out of the virtual directory. I just want IIS to be able to load static images, css, and js files.

If anyone has some bright ideas I would be most appreciative!