Question

I am trying to call an old VB6 dll (no source code available) from an ASP.NET project. The dll connects to a server using windows authentication, so I need to call functions as a specific user, not NETWORKSERVICE as it is now.

This would preferably be determined at call time, not load time because I am impersonating the remote user and would like for this to be the user calling the functions, not the application user and not NETWORKSERVICE as it is now.

So, theres the browser running as USER, connecting to the application impersonating USER, calling the dll as USER, but the dll is trying to connect to a remote server as NETWORKSERVICE, not USER.

Is it possible to make this dll connect to the remote server as USER? Or, if nothing else, connect as the application user?

Edit:
Impersonation is done in code by calling Impersonate() on the remote user’s WindowsIdentity. The company I work for has a custom SecurityPrincipal and SecurityIdentity so it’s kind of weird how I have to go about getting the WindowsIdentity (it’s a little more in depth than User.Identity), but I have used this method before successfully and have verified that System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name
is the correct user during the impersonation.

Answer 1

I did eventually find the problem (which just lead to other problems, but anyway) it turned out to be I was missing an AspCompat="true" on my page. Actually the problem was that I was using a “Handler” and not a “Page”. Handlers do not have the STA abilities that Pages have. What was happening was every time I tried to access the COM component, there would be a thread switch (impersonation lost) since the application is running in an MTA and the COM component must run in an STA.