Unable to run MVC web application locally - sql-server

Question

I’ve been asked to make changes to an existing MVC website, unfortunately the original developer of this site is no longer at the company, there isn’t any documentation and nobody actually knows much about it other than it current runs in our test & live environments. groan
Anyway when I set the project as the starting project and run it I get the following lovely white error page:
Access is denied.
Description: An error occurred while accessing the resources required to serve this request. The server may not be configured for access to the requested URL.
Error message 401.2.: Unauthorized: Logon failed due to server configuration. Verify that you have permission to view this directory or page based on the credentials you supplied and the authentication methods enabled on the Web server. Contact the Web server's administrator for additional assistance.
Not a massive amount for me to go on (for me at least).
So I checked in the web.config file and the authorization is set as:
<authorization>
<deny users=”?” />
</authorization>
If I change this to the code below I get a page saying it couldn’t be loaded, but it is a step further as I can at least get into the code a little.
<authorization>
<allow users="*"/>
</authorization>
The code does do some validation against Active Directory, which works, and I can get around that pesky security code by setting a break point and moving past the functionality. The code itself doesn’t do anything but return true if the user is valid (I move the breakpoint to this), or false if they are invalid. This is the only way I have been able to catch a breakpoint within my controller to see if anything happens, but nothing sticks out.
The code, as partial as it may be, is in a class which will use LINQ to get the right information.
public ReadOnlyCollection<Application> GetApplicationStatus()
{
using (ApplicationDBEntities context = new ApplicationDBEntities())
{
var results = (from parameters in context.Parameters
join application in context.ApplicationIds on parameters.ApplicationId equals application.ApplicationId1
where parameters.ParameterName.Equals("DateTime", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) &&
!parameters.Application.Equals(0)
select new Application
{
ApplicationId = parameters.ServiceId,
ApplicationStatus = application.Status,
DateAdded = parameters.ParameterValue
}).ToList();
return new ReadOnlyCollection<Application>(results);
}
}
In the above code it will throw an EntityException when getting the results, the message in the exception is “The underlying provider failed on Open.” The specific line highlighted is var results = (from parameters in context.Parameters
With this I figured that either the code current live isn’t the same as what I have (hopefully not the case) or something else was up, which is when I spotted the Inner Exception message: Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\\ANONYMOUS LOGON'.
The connection string is as follows:
<connectionStrings>
<add name="ApplicationDBEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/ApplicationDBModel.csdl|res://*/ApplicationDBModel.ssdl|res://*/ApplicationDBModel.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string="data source=MyServer;initial catalog=MyDB;integrated security=True;multipleactiveresultsets=True;App=EntityFramework"" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
</connectionStrings>
The SQL database that it is trying to get the information from is one that I have direct access to. Could this be that the IIS account doesn’t have access or something? Are there any tips or hints to try and find the root cause of this problem?

Answer 1

In your connection string there is intergated security = true, that means that your site try to get data from sql with authentication as user that runs application pool of IIS.
So you should run your iis application pool by user that have rights on db and, may be, on on other resources of your site.
Another possibility is that there is sql user to go to db an you should change connection string in config file.