Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Tips and Tricks to get CKS Forms Based Authentication Solution working properly

Codeplex FBA (http://cks.codeplex.com/releases/view/17901) is a great tool and its configuration is defined in great detail on this article (http://devcow.com/blogs/jdattis/archive/2007/02/23/Office_SharePoint_Server_2007_Forms_Based_Authentication_FBA_Walkthrough_Part_1.aspx). However there are a few gotchas to take care of when configuring MOSS on Windows Server 2008 box:

1) After you update the hosts file with the names such as:
127.0.0.1 projectextranet.test.com
127.0.0.1 projectextranet
After you create the SharePoint Application and Site collection successfully and try to access the site, you would notice that when you try to access either of the above sites through IE, it will prompt you for a username and password and the logon prompt keeps appearing that will eventually timeout. The quick fix for this is explained here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861/en-us (apply the Microsoft Fix tool)

2)Once you have configured your FBA and you try to add the spadmin user created in the steps as described in article above through Central Administratio for the extranet site, it will not resolve the name. This error happens if your Central Administration Application Pool account does not have access to the FBA database created earlier. So make sure you give at least db_owner access to the Central Admin App Pool account and then perform iisreset. EUREKA! Now it will find your users in FBA DB

3)You get an error "Dependency feature with id 01aa8d8b-000a-4c35-8f4f-5d1280377650 for feature 'FBAManagementSelf' (id: 23c44729-fb03-4882-a0bf-c6fb3ddd81fd) is not installed." - Fix this by downloading the latest copy of FBA here (http://cks.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=97072). Compile and build the deploy folder using WSPBuilder and then use the new CKS.FBA.wsp file to deploy to your farm