Monday, March 06, 2006

Access is denied - Version 5.1.1.11

System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Access is denied exception in Sitecore 5.1.1.11 Right, it's about 3 hours past the time where I would have normally headed home. I was, however, stuck with trying to figure out why my fully working Sitecore 5.1.1.11 installation suddenly started failing with the above message after being deployed from my development environment to my operations environment. No fun, I tell ya :-P So here's the deal. Apparently 5.1.1.11 implements some (new, or for the first time - I don't know) Performance Counters. This is all good and well - I would have appreciated it a bit more though, if they in their update notes would have told me what might be needed to be done to avoid the above error. As it turns out, your ASPNET account needs access to a specific registry key for this error to go away. Specifically: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib. So (and many probably don't know this) fire up REGEDT32.exe (Start->Run), navigate to the key, select "Permissions" from the menu - and grant the ASPNET account full control to the key. Voila - problem solved. Thank you very much Bruce Johnson for your blogpost about the subject (not Sitecore related, the problem is of a more general nature). *shakes fist in the general direction of Sitecore HQ*... dudes... might wanna mention something like this, no? :-P

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems like this security issue only happens on windows 2000 and not windows 2003.

On what OS are sitecore running?

I did also use many hours trying to solve this error, my fix was to add asp.net to the local administrator group :-(

Sitecore support are trying to find a better fix

Mark Cassidy said...

Operational environment is Windows 2000, so you could be right about that one.

Adding ASPNET account to Administrators will solve the issue, but I most highly recommend you don't - applying the described fix here will work just as well :-)

Sitecore can't really fix it I imagine, as it has to do with basic priveledges and account rights in the operating system.

They CAN, however, mention this issue in their release notes and on SDN.