We have leased our own dedicated server as part of working on getting the back end tech setup for CodeMash 2008. Last year we used Sharepoint 2003 for the planning portal. This year we will be using WSS v3. There are a lot of great enhancements that will help us a lot.
I installed WSS on our server, and then deployed an asp.net application that we are going to use to collect speaker submissions. This app is a simple form, with some validation, that then submits the topic to a list in WSS via the WSS web services.
The app worked great on my laptop connecting to our WSS site on our dedicated server. When I deployed the app however, it was failing the authentication into the WSS web services.
The first step to troubleshoot this was to log into the portal from my machine. That worked. Then, try to login from the server itself (since that is where the web service is being called from.). That didn't work. The portal was working fine, but wouldn't let you login from the local machine.
After weeks of scouring all search engines, I finally stumbled across a blog posting by Robert Bogue. His article talks about this problem, and has all of the details. The short answer is that with IIS and AD, a site with 'integrated authentication' will use NTLM when the user is remote, but Kerberos when the user is local. Kerberos doesn't like web sites with host headers, and fails to log you in. Robert documents a few command line commands that you can use to disable Kerberos on the specific web site, but leave NTLM in place.
That fixed it. Thanks Robert! Turns out his blog has some great Sharepoint content.
ps. Step seven of his instructions has a small typo. NTAuthenticationProvider should be plural, NTAuthenticationProviders