Category: Quick Troubleshooting Tips

As lame as this sounds, there have been a few (rare) situations where trying to do something with a Windows-Claims web application within Central Administration fails with an Access Denied (sorry, this site has not been shared with you) error due to lack of permissions for your Windows Classic authentication account. If you find a

Often while troubleshooting authentication or permission problems, you need to see the actual account name for the user or group added to permissions. This is particularly important in SAML / Trusted Provider authentication because the way the claim is being passed in the SAML assertion must match exactly with the way claim has been added

  When the SAML Identity Provider (ADFS, SiteMinder, Ping Federate, OKTA, etc) token-signing certificate is renewed or rolled over, SharePoint can be in trouble. This is because there’s currently no functionality in SharePoint to automatically update the certificate within the Trusted Identity Token Issuer on the SharePoint side when it’s been updated on the Identity

Often in troubleshooting SharePoint, we’re interested to know on which Web-Front-End (WFE) a certain request landed. When you have multiple WFEs that are load balanced, this is not easily discernable. One trick is to edit your HOSTS file and point the load balanced URL at the IP address of one WFE. That method certainly has