Username according to ASP.NET Windows auth doesn't match logon name in Active Directory

Question

My colleague changed his user logon name in Active Directory today in order to match a new company policy for logon names.

On his machine, the %username% environment variable now shows the new logon name.

Our intranet, which uses Windows Authentication (NTLM) is still reporting his the old username (through Page.User.Identity.Name).

I am aware that ASP.NET can cache user credentials, but we have stopped and then restarted the app pool but still have this symptom.

Can anyone advise what might be going on?

Answer 1

This is an issue caused by SID caching on the web server. The WindowsPrincipal is retrieved from a cache, the only way to clear the cache is to reboot the web server machine. There are some code changes you could apply(to retrieve using Windows API), but I would recommend just a quick reboot.