SharePoint Web Site Keeps on Prompting for Credentials

This article breaks into three sections.

• Identify and cause
• Add Exception to strict name checking
• Disable loopback

Identify and Cause

There are many reasons for this to happen, but most of the time, it will happen when you change the Access mapping to match your domain.

For an example, you might have webwfe01 as your web application in your default zone. And if you change that to www.sampleweb.com, this may occur for Windows Users.

This is because by not having Fully Qualified Domain name specified is not matching with the local machine.

For example:

Your local machine can be in a domain myorg.com and the specified Mapping is sampleweb.com.

Thus, this will cause LoopBack check which is true by design for security reasons.

Microsoft specifies two methods to resolve the issue.

1. Disable Strict Name Checking
2. Disable Loopback Check

Reference: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/896861/you-receive-error-401.1-when-you-browse-a-web-site-that-uses-integrated-authentication-and-is-hosted-on-iis-5.1-or-a-later-version

You need to do it in all SharePoint servers for safe side in the future service deployment. But it is necessary for all Front End servers.

Disable Strict Name Checking in IIS

This is useful in many scenarios. For me, it's more useful for disable keep on prompting credentials in SharePoint 2013 Environment.

In this method, you need to add your domain as an exception list to IIS for not checking the FQDN for loopback.

Open the RegEdit.

And navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

and click on MSV1_0:

Then add new Multi Connection String:

And add BackConnectionHostNames.

Then you will see that is added to the registry.

You can double click and add your fully qualified domain names (one per line) that will be working as an exception.

Then, you can save and restart the IIS.

Disable Loopback Check in IIS

This is useful in many scenarios. For me, it's more useful to disable keep on prompting credentials in SharePoint 2013 Environment.

In this method, you can simply disable the check by editing the following registry key.

Open the RegEdit.

And navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Click on Lsa Registry and add DisableLoopbackCheck registry key as DWORD value.

After adding the registry key, you can find the entry as follows:

Then double click the key and Enter 1.

And click OK.

Then restart the IIS.