sharepoint permissions issues - "Access Denied"

Question

I am trying to replicate a production issue in my dev environment but am running into permissions issues, where a user in the "Contributor" group gets an access denied error. Furthermore, if I make this user a Site Collection administrator he still gets the same access denied error.

Why is this happening? How do I fix?

UPDATE: I do not have a problem when I log in from inside my VM in the dev environment. The problem must be that my dev environment is its own domain. So the question becomes, how can I log in from a machine not in the domain? I'd like to avoid extending the web application if possible.

UPDATE 2: By the way, I'm able to log in the site from my host OS fine when the credentials I use are of the "System Account."

Answer 1

when do they get the access denied error? hitting the site?

are you sure that the user you're adding to the group is the same user you're logging in as? Sometimes if you have multiple user stores you can add different users to the group: DOMAIN\joe.user, forms:joe.user, someotheraccountstore:joe.user, etc.

Answer 2

Troubleshooting Access Denied errors is something that plagues me daily... so I feel your pain.

I am assuming this user is trying to access some page in SharePoint. From my experience, if even one Web Part on the page is accessing something the user does not have access to, the entire Access Denied page is shown.

One way to troubleshoot access to the SITE (not the page) is by visiting the "All Site Content" page: /_layouts/viewlsts.aspx. If they can get to this page, then it is something wrong with the page and not the site.

Next I would try exporting and then DELETING (not closing) webparts from the page to determine which one is causing the problem. Since you have a dev environment, I assume you could do another restore if things get too mucked up.