ASP .NET ACTIVE DIRECTORY ERROR

jerm

Hi,

I run an asp .net active directory query on my server computer and my
development machine and it runs fine. I today took my code and ported
it to my laptop and it gives the error :
The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted

"Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of
the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more
information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The
specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted"

What would cause this error to occur? All my files are the same,
including my web.config files!

Thanks
jeremiah

Joe Kaplan

Your code probably is doing a serverless LDAP bind somewhere
(LDAP://DC=domain,DC=com instead of LDAP://domain.com/DC=domain,DC=com or
something like that). This is fine, but it is important to know that
serverless binds depend on the security context of the current thread or
process to determine which domain to contact. If that security context is
not a domain account (a local machine account for example), then the
serverless bind will not work. Since ASP.NET runs on different security
contexts depending on the configuration and the version of IIS being used,
you see these issues a lot moving between different deployments.

Including the DNS domain name in all of your binding strings is one way to
help avoid this issue. However, you may also need to provide credentials so
the bind will be successful as well, so it is only part of the story. It is
generally better to make sure you know what your security context is and
make sure that is consistent across deployments so you'll understand the
dependencies you are taking and won't run into any surprises like this one.

Joe K.

--
Joe Kaplan-MS MVP Directory Services Programming
Co-author of "The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming"

--
"jerm" <> wrote in message
news:1184003839.385632.292370@m37g2000prh.googlegr oups.com...
> Hi,
>
> I run an asp .net active directory query on my server computer and my
> development machine and it runs fine. I today took my code and ported
> it to my laptop and it gives the error :
> The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted
>
> "Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of
> the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more
> information about the error and where it originated in the code.
>
> Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The
> specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted"
>
> What would cause this error to occur? All my files are the same,
> including my web.config files!
>
> Thanks
> jeremiah
>