Outlook web Access multiple authentication problem

[vurve]

Hi,

I have an exchange 2000 server deployed at my company. OWA over SSL is available to users for accessing their emails when on the road or from home. Of late, the authentication for OWA has started giving some problems.

Earlier, when someone used to go to

https://<our_company_name>/exchange,

they used to get a single login pop-up box with 2 fields, username and password.

The user then used to enter their username in the syntax <domain_name>\<user_name> and the password

eg. username : xyz\johndoe, where xyz is the Active Directory domain

Since past few weeks, OWA started throwing up two authentication windows, one after the other. The first auth windows has 3 fields, username, password and domain. The user needs to enter their username, password and domain name separately in these 3 fields.

After this, another auth window comes up, which is same as the auth window in normal circumstances (username, password; 2 fields only; username is domain\username).

Users are getting confused due to these 2 windows, and usually end up entering wrong info in either windows, and sometimes this locks up their accounts (due to local security policy).

I tried to find out why this might be happening, but could not get any solution. Last night, I reapplied exchange SP3 and the Post SP3 roll back updates, and seems to have partially solved the problem. Now the dual auth problem does not occur when someone accesses the OWA from within the company network. However, the problem still persists when accessing OWA from outside, which is what really matters.

Please help me solve this problem.

Thanks in advance!

Vivek

 

[ehartle]

You should check IIS on the exchange server to make sure that you are using only Basic Authentication on the Exchange virtual directory. All other virtual directories associated with exchange (Exadmin, Exchweb, Public, etc) should not be set to use SSL and should use basic authentication as well.

HTH
Earle