Using UNC path as paths location in Mecurial IIS6 Server2003

Question

I'm running the latest Mercurial and Python 2.6; IIS6 is using the wildcard ISAPI method to attach the site to the Mecurial hgwebdir_wsgi

[paths]
\ = \\COMP3254\TestRepo\*

[web]
baseurl = /
allow_push = *
push_ssl = false
style = monoblue

The setup works perfectly if I reference the local drive E:\repo* but doesnt work if I specify the network as above; I've given the server (MERCDEV01$) full permissions on the shared folder on COMP3254, I can't think of any other reason it wouldn't work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Could be a delegation problem. You can NTLM-authenticate to the webserver (and your credentials will be trusted on its local drives), but the webserver can't authenticate you to a remote location, because it does not know your password (i.e. it can't delegate your credentials).

Have you tried setting up the network location as a virtual directory on the server? You can then enter credentials IIS will cache and use for accesses to that location.

Answer 2

hgwebdir doesn't work for me either with UNC paths - It means you can't use it as a server without hosting the repos on the same machine as the web server.

Answer 3

Ok.. I solved it. The user running the web server (Apache in my case) defaulted to Local System, which does not have permission to access network resources. When I changed it to a user with domain access (and gave that user admin access to the local machine) everything worked fine.

Running a web server with that sort of privilege is of course risky - but in my case it is an internal server. Presumably you can cherry pick just the right permissions to do this in a more secure manner.