SharePoint Custom Development

Consistent access denied / Login prompt and HTTP 401 errors in IISLOG when trying to open up Central Admin in SharePoint 2013

By Soma Choudhuri • November 12, 2013 • 3426 Views

Issue

SharePoint 2013 installation went well without any errors, however, I was not able to get to Central Admin. It consistently gave me access denied error message and login prompt.

Solution

After a great deal of troubleshooting, it turned out that there was a setting in IIS that needed to be corrected. This setting is easy to overlook. There could be other settings that could lead to similar behavior, But this one worked for me.

Here is the entry I needed to create.

Consistent access denied / Login prompt and HTTP 401 errors in IISLOG when trying to open up Central Admin in SharePoint 2013

Here is how I created it:

Go to IIS Manager (inetmgr.exe)
Select Server name from left pane, go to Authorization Rules

Right click anywhere on the body section and add

Select “All Anonymous Users” section and click ok

This loaded the Central Admin for me.

Soma Choudhuri

Soma Choudhuri is the Sr. Technical Architect at Netwoven Inc. focused on Enterprise Content Management (ECM). In her 19 years of career, her primary area of expertise has been developing and implementing SharePoint collaboration portals and .NET web applications. Soma has been a leading Microsoft technologies expert for clients across USA and India. Prior to joining Netwoven, she held many organizational leadership roles across manufacturing and financial services industries.

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