Starting a Process as a Different User in ASP.NET

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+2 Q:

Starting a Process as a Different User in ASP.NET

I have an ASP.NET MVC web app and in one of the controller actions I want to start process (exe file). The process needs to run under a domain user, because it accesses other resources on the domain. This can either be a single hard coded user, or the user that is currently on the web page. The web.config is using Windows authentication.

I have tried turning impersonation on and tried turning impersonation on specifying a specific user. Both of these scenarios will cause permission issues.

I have also tried starting the process as a specific domain/user/password, but this will give me an error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password". I'm positive that the username/password is correct, and doing a "runas" works fine.

I'm not even sure of the "correct" way to do this. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

+1 A:

The correct way is to not launch a process from a Web app. Use something like MSMQ in WCF instead.

RichardOD 2009-10-13 18:21:44

Ok, so shove some info into MSMQ, then pull it out with a service that is running as a user that can handle this... I could just create a WCF service to do the work that the exe is currently doing then. I was hoping to not have to have a whole other service to do this. Maybe that's the best way though.

Josh Close 2009-10-13 18:54:05

It shouldn't be too difficult to do. If you have Windows server 2008 you could host the service using WAS- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms734677.aspx. Writing a Windows service isn't really that much more work though- it took me less than 10 minutes to convert a console WCF service into a Windows Service (I only have Windows 2003).

RichardOD 2009-10-13 19:03:28

I'm going to move my exe code into a WCF service that's started as a domain user and see if that works better.

Josh Close 2009-10-13 19:18:36

Doing it as a WCF service hosted in a Windows service worked great. I just set the Windows service startup user as the domain account.

Josh Close 2009-10-20 16:54:30

Josh- that's good. Glad it worked for you!

RichardOD 2009-10-21 07:19:33

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Starting a Process as a Different User in ASP.NET

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