User Authentication prompt never appears in IE6 (Using XP)

[Susan]

Using XP Home Ed. on HP Laptop (have 2 different machines
with same problem, noticed upon purchase of each
machine). Am using Internet Explorer 6. When trying to
access certain websites that require entry of user name
and password, the user authentication prompt simply does
not appear and I cannot access page ("Cannot Find
Server...The page cannot be displayed...). Example at
http://www.brooklynfriends.org/community/index.html.
Exhausted an HP tech's ideas in 2 hours, we eventually
tried re-installing IE, have fiddled with User
Authentication in Internet Options, still no luck for all
similar sites. Have switched to Mozilla for this type of
website and have no problems getting the User
Authentication prompt with that browser. Has anyone
successfully gotten around this problem in IE?

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

user authentication prompt simply does not appear

I tried to help someone else who had the same symptom on Win98.
He didn't have very good tools which made the exercise pretty painful.
With XP you should have netcap and then be able to capture the
message response which should be causing you your prompt.

Although it would be nice to see the trace formatted you can actually
get useful information from the resulting raw .cap file about the HTTP
message flow because so much of it is character based. However, if you
want you could install Ethereal (or use netmon if you happen to have a
Windows server).

On some servers it's possible to use telnet to simulate the connection
to your site over port 80. To simulate the connection reasonably accurately
paste the following when the telnet screen clears:

GET http://www.brooklynfriends.org/community/index.html HTTP/1.1

Here is what you should be seeing: (bracketed by example tags)

<example ------------------------------------------------------->
HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 21:24:30 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux)
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="brooklynfriends.org"
Vary: accept-language
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
</example ------------------------------------------------------->

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make that simulation work with this server.
Perhaps you would have to paste in more...

Ok. I got it. You just need to paste in one more line:

Host: www.brooklynfriends.org

And then finish it off with a couple of Enters.


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle