I would like to post one wired and interesting issue I faced before few days.

Recently I was deploying one of my project on client end. Basically it was a Web Application but unlike other setups they were going to use that by terminal access. Meaning that all Users of the Portal will be having unique login into their(client's) Windows Network Domain and users will be logging into the Portal by logging into the Server machine first with given Windows domain credentials and then to the Portal.

This setup seems to be easy and no worry as whole portal will be accessed via LOCALHOST only..! Looks odd for any web-application though but that was the requirement for the client (keeping their security concerns in mind).

I have been given Administrative User to login to the server machine and setup everything. I did setup and did my post implementation testing on the machine with my user. Everything seems to be working as expected and I gave green flag to my superior.

Later on I have been buzzed with 2 issues from the Client.

  1. Portal is not working in Internet Explorer at all.
  2. Users are not able to download files from my Portal.

I asked for login details they used for testing and which they were actually going to give to their Users.

Problems & their Solutions:

1. Portal is not working in Internet Explorer at all.

I got the test account into their Windows domain and logged in to portal. Due to some domain may be set via Active Directory on Windows server users are having limited rights. I have tried modifying security settings on IE but of no use. I can't override them with my given windows credentials. The reason behind not working in IE was that given Windows User was not having enough rights to create ActiveX object and due to that we were not able to create ActiveX object for Ajax call from the browser..! This was the serious issue. I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 which was the latest available that time on the client machine. Portal was working flawless on the Firefox and there can't be any ActiveX issue for Firefox and so not with Ajax.

I demonstrated things working well with Firefox and explained Client's Network guy to deal with the issue for security settings.

2. Users are not able to download files from my Portal.

Firefox Download Blocked

Firefox Download Blocked

Here goes another issue to be solved. File downloads were not working neither from Firefox nor from IE. I was hopping that with Firefox windows security policy should not matter much and I will get things done. They were using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Server 2003 and I have already uninstalled Enhanced Internet Security settings. Even with Firefox 3 I was getting this error "This download has been blocked by your security zone policy". I thought that at least Firefox should not worry about Security Zone Policy. But with Firefox3 it inherits Windows/IE security settings. I did some goggling and found that this was supposed to happen with Firefox 3 for executable files, but it was happening in my case even for RTF files.

There is way to modify some parameter of Mozilla Firefox using "about:config". In case you came up to this post in google by searching same problem following links could help you out.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=673575&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=0
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_save_or_download_files#Reset_system_Internet_security_settings_-_Windows
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Image:Fx3exeBlocked.png
http://support.mozilla.com/sq/kb/unable+to+download+or+save+files

But things didn't worked out fast enough for me after changing some settings in Firefox Config but any way mean while I did un-installation of Firefox 3 and installed Firefox 2.X and here I go..! Things were working like breeze again.

Firefox 3 respects the Windows setting for downloads, you need to adjust the Windows settings. For details see the Reset system Internet security settings section of unable to download or save files.

I know it's not a permanent solution but I needed quick fix that time.

Let me know if you have faced such problem and have any different solution for this kind of problem.