Occasional client credentials rejection when running WCF through VPN - wcf

Recently I migrated my company's product client-server communication from socket based Kerberos enabled tcp/ip communication within corporate intranet to WCF with netTcpBinding, Windows security and encryption and signing on, impersonation turned off. After quite a lot reading everything was ready and operational within our test environment, so we exposed service contract in production release. Clients from within intranet communicate smoothly with server, but the once who are connected through VPN suffer from occasional "The server has rejected client credentials" exception. Log off/log in fixes things by their side, but just for a couple of minutes. Windows user's password, I tested with is a fresh one.
I tried to disabling connection pooling, but this didn't fix the problem. Any ideas what might be wrong with our infrastructure or WCF configuration ?

Related

Connection timeout over ssl

I have an client application that connects to a remote server via https for commercial purposes. This connection is using old IO (blocking connection). It normally runs smoothly.
Recently I have cloned the client thus created a new client instance, running from the same box and using the same client certificate. I'm noticing many connection timeouts from the server. I wonder if the cloning may have somehow been the cause of the timeouts and if there is a ssl issue here.
Both instances receive the following system parameters for security:
javax.net.ssl.trustStore=cacerts
javax.net.ssl.keyStore=1234567890123
javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=wordpass
Unfortunately the support from the server side is quite limited. I hope someone in this forum may come up with an idea.

Delphi / WCF SOAP connectivity and Virtual Machine (VMWare) settings

I've got a working WCF service and a working Delphi client. On a normal PC, they work nicely. On a VM that's "Bridged" they work nicely if I log onto the domain (but not if I logon locally to the VM as administrator). If the VM is NATed, the connection attempt times out.
I would love to hear people's thoughts on what could be making such a difference to whether the client can successfully connect to the WCF service. Bear in mind I'm connecting with basicHttpBinding with no security.
The service is setup to use System Account (interact with desktop is NOT checked), and it starts automatically. The service URI doesn't change, the port is open, and can be telnet'd to in all scenarios.
Any ideas or pointers?
Within the VM, open Internet Explorer and verify that you can view the WSDL of the WCF service. If you can't, then your issue is connectivity and has nothing to do with your Delphi code.
Group Policies and Enterprise Security solutions that swap certificates or require certificates to be registered (we're using a UTM called CyberRoam) make a difference.
Also when Virtual Machines join a domain, their ComputerNames are added to a list maintained by the Domain Controller. When the same Virtual Machine is "moved" or "copied", its ComputerName should be changed to avoid DNS resolution issues.
I'm not claiming this as the definitive answer, however it does explain the issues I noticed in this instance.

Any known issues resolving a hostname from an IIS hosted service

Summary:
Does anybody know if there are known issues or configuration gotchas with an IIS service connecting to an Azure based service?
Scenario:
I currently have a scenario that requires me to host two web-services, one in Azure, and one on a server running IIS. The IIS hosted service (a WCF service) connects to the Azure hosted service (actually the Azure storage API) in order to fetch certain information. This information is manipulated and returned to the client.
Client -> IIS Service -> Azure Storage Service
Issue:
I'm running into issues with the IIS service connecting to the Azure Service. The hostname cannot be resolved. I'm using the Azure Storage client from my code, but have actually tried this using the azure API calls, and they also do not work from IIS. I captured the requests using Fiddler (on a different machine), they match the azure REST API calls, as expected. These requests, when made outside of IIS on the host machine execute properly. It is only when they are issued by the IIS service that they fail.
In my research other people have been running into this issue when there's a firewall problem, but since I can hit the service properly from the machine, that doesn't seem to fit the bill. My hunch is that there's a configuration issue I need to sort out in IIS, but I've failed to find anything useful with my searches.
Does anyone have any information on why this might be occuring (known bugs, gotchas etc)? Any workarounds? From a SOA perspective, this seems fairly critical to understand.
Any assitance anyone has would be helpful. Thank you.
Sounds like a proxy configuration issue. Check how your IIS server connected to Internet. If you are using some sort of proxy to get to Internet, that connection has to be configured correctly.
Specifically, if your proxy servers are Microsoft ISA server, or Microsoft Forefront TMG, then you need to check two things:
ISA server client or Forefront TMG client software is installed on the server
The account used by IIS application pool is domain user. ISA Server/TMG are designed to work only with user account, not service account. Alternative workaround for this limitation is using "defaultProxy" configuration in web.config, however it only wokrs for HTTP/HTTPS.
If you use different proxy server, then other issues might be involved, for example proxy might require authentication.

NetTcpBinding wcf service with remote access AND transport security?

I am struggling with a WCF issue relating to name resolution-or something like so. When I consume a wcf service (netTcpBinding) on an application server via a web application on the web server it doesn't work. Ok it doesn't work in most situations. If you access the web application from the web server itself using localhost or 127.0.0.1 it works. However accessing it through the web server via another client machine or accessing the web application locally on the web server using the host name or IP address does not work. In both instances you get a socket connection aborted error.
What makes it more interesting is that switching all the security to 'none' as opposed to 'transport' resolves the issue.
My question is, is it possible to access wcf services using your web server and still use transport security? Or is this a bug/designed behaviour?
Many thanks for any insight,
Steve
The default NetTcpBinding security option is Kerberos / Windows Authentication. If your client and service are not on the same domain it will not work. You may need to look at certificate based authentication.
If you your service is running under a domain account, try changing it to LocalService or NetworkService to see if it resolves the issue.
Transport security typically only works point-to-point - when the client connects directly to the server.
If you have clients that come in from the internet, you have no control over how many intermediary hops they go through - so Transport security, even if you get it to work, will most likely not work at all, e.g. your message might be protected from the client to the first hop, and from the last hop to your server - but not in between hops.
For an internet scenario, typically, Transport security is not a valid option - use Message Security for those cases.
I'm not 100% sure why the connection wouldn't work at all - but in any case, if you're not behind a corporate firewall, I wouldn't be using netTcp with transport security in such a scenario.
Could you please add your server side config (anything inside <system.serviceModel>) to your question to see how you set up Transport security?

Unregistered SecurityContextSecurityToken on WCF

Does anyone recognise this error?
The SecurityContextSecurityToken with context-id=urn:uuid:xxx (key generation-id=) is not registered
It has suddenly appeared in the service trace log of my WCF service.
We had a Windows service successfully transmitting data into the WCF service for a day until it broke. The error manifests when the Windows service tries to connect to the WCF service.
It's highly unlikely that the environments changed. The two services exist on separate machines (an application server and a web server). Both are Windows Server 2003 SP1 machines, and the web server is running IIS 6.
Unfortunately, we have scarce access to the servers to help us debug, so any guesses on what might be wrong would be highly appreciated.
Indi
We had this problem with Web Service Extension 3.0, which was used before WCF. I have not experianced this with WCF, but I think that it is worth checking.
The scenario works like this:
The service starts and the user that is the identity of the service gets logged on.
When the service makes a call it is done in the security context of this user
After a while the logon token becomes so old (a day?) that the service will no longer accept it.
The easy way to test this is to restart the windows service.