ASP.NET Brackets In Url stopping forms authentication / cookies working

Question

I have a ASP.NET website deployed under IIS uisng virtual directories. I'm using forms authentication.

For some reason my client has deployed it under a strange virtual directory name which has lots of brackets

http://localhost/(DirectoryName(1))/

This seems to stop forms authentication working. Does anyone know why?

Answer 1

In the past I had set up a host name of

http://local_test

and this also stopped forms authentication from working. Eventually I tracked it down to the underscore "_" in a domain name not allowing cookies to be set and therefore forms authentication not working. My guess is this is something related. The "(" and ")" are preventing the forms authentication cookie from getting set.