HTTP 401 error in Windows Authentication disappears after swapping Providers

Posted by Ray Cheng on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Ray Cheng
Published on 2012-10-01T20:51:56Z Indexed on 2012/10/01 21:40 UTC
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The IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 is acting really weird. We deploy our web apps as web sites with appcmd.exe. After they are deployed, if I browse to them, I'll get HTTP 401 errors.

The web sites are only have Windows Authentication enabled and the providers are Negotiate and NTLM in such order. But if I swap the providers, the HTTP 401 error goes away. Even if I swap it back, the errors are still gone. So the order of the providers doesn't seem to matter, what matters is the swapping. It must have triggered something. Even if we delete the web site and application pool and reinstall the web sites, the errors are still gone. So far, we can't reproduce it easily since it happens randomly.

Has anyone experienced this? How do I go about to troubleshoot it?

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