GP Web Client: 'Web Client user only' or Windows Authenticated user login issues.

Over the next several weeks we will be pushing out some blogs about GP Web Client. I wanted to kick things off with a common issue I have been seeing more and more cases being opened for.

Let’s say that you have the GP Web Client up and running and users are able to log in with their GP\SQL authenticated user accounts. You decide to associate their Windows accounts with their GP accounts in the GP User Setup window to make the login process a little more seamless. Or you start to set up ‘Web Client user only’ accounts for users who will be using the Web Client exclusively. Once you set this up though the users are still being directed to log in with their regular GP user accounts. They may receive the following error:

“This login failed. Attempt to login again or contact your system administrator.”

You may also find login failure errors in the SQL server logs or the Event Viewer logs.

This will usually indicate that the Web Client SQL user (SQL Proxy user) account has not been setup correctly. Here are some considerations and troubleshooting steps you can look into before opening a support case.

1. The Web Client SQL user has the same limitations as a regular GP user. The username and password cannot exceed 15 characters in length. It will let you set it up and exceed these limitations, but GP will not be able to properly log the user in.

2. You cannot use the SA account for this feature.

Here are the steps that you should go through to make sure this is setup and working properly.

1. Launch GP Utilities as SA and get to the drop-down menu. Select the ‘Manage Web Client SQL Server login’ option and click Process.

2. If you already have a ‘Login Name’ populated that means this process has already been run through. I recommend that you delete the user that is listed here from SQL completely before proceeding. If the Login Name field is blank, then we know the SQL user has not been setup.

3. Put in a new Login Name and password. This is going to create a brand new SQL authenticated user and assign the proper permissions to that user in SQL. (Do not check the ‘Change password’ option since we are setting this user up from scratch)

4. Once you’ve specified this user in Utilities you now need to specify this user in the GP Web Client install\setup. Go into Programs and Features and run a Repair of the GP Web Client. You are looking for the following screen:
   

5. You will enter the same username\password here that you just specified in GP Utilities. The username is case sensitive so keep that in mind.

6. Complete the repair – You should not need to change any settings and only be required to enter the passwords of the service accounts you used to do the install.

Once you’ve finished this process you can test to see if the users are able to log into GP with their Windows credentials. If you are still having a problem at this point you may want to open a support case, but the majority of our calls are being resolved with the above solutions. I’ve only had 1 other case where it was a permissions issue with the GP code folder on the Session Host server. I think the code folder had been copied from another machine or something as Inheritance was broken and we had to explicitly give the users permissions to the folder. There was an obvious ‘Access Denied’ error occurring in Event Viewer for this issue though.

I hope the above information helps you out if you get into this situation. Stay tuned for more Web Client blogs from the rest of the team over the next few weeks!