Without any apparent trigger, a user will be prompted for username and password when attempting to connect to some of our intranet pages. The user has successfully connected to these resources in the past without having to enter any credentials.
It doesn’t happen on all of our intranet pages. It appears confined to pages hosted on a specific server and developed using Cold Fusion. Once one of those pages starts prompting for credentials, all of them hosted on that server do. If a user enters his username in the form domain\username (along with his password), he can successfully access the web page. However, once the problem starts the user is prompted for login credentials every time he tries to access any of those page.
Normally only one user at a time will start seeing credential prompts. Users are affected at the rate of one every few weeks to a couple of months. I’ve got around 15 affected users. I first started seeing the problem about two years ago.
While the problem has historically been confined to laptops, I am now seeing it on desktops. All users are running IE6 on XP SP2. Internet Explorer is configured for “Integrated Windows Authentication” on the Advanced tab. Age of the system does not seem to be a factor; I’ve seen it start on systems within a month of deployment, and on systems that have been in use for over two years. Installing any new patches for IE has no effect.
Does anybody have a theory about what’s triggering this? I’m assuming this is caused by something changing on the server that hosts the troublesome sites that’s causing the server to reject the user’s domain credentials as passed to it by IE. I’m not the webmaster or a developer, so that’s only an assumption on my part; feel free to suggest other root causes. The server is not at my site. What needs to be done so my users aren’t prompted for this information?
