I have an ASP.NET app using built-in Membership functionality. As such, I have a connection string in my web.config that looks like this:
<add name="MembershipSqlServer" connectionString="Data Source=servername;Database=aspnetdb;uid=user;pwd=password;" />
When working on my dev machine, everything is peachy keen. But when I move things to the web server (which also happens to run the SQL Server), I get this error when User.IsInRole() is called:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Login failed for user ‘NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE’.
F$%*&!! Why is it attempting to connect in this way? Why isn’t it using user/password from the connection string? Web.config is identical on dev and server, I am using the DB on the server during development.
OK, I figured it out… only 35 minutes. 😛
Long story short: There are two parts to asp.net membership… a membership provider and a ROLE provider. Why you’d ever want these two things separated, I don’t know… But my web.config wasn’t specifying the role provider and connection string, so it was defaulting to the settings in machine.config (aka LocalSqlServer connection string).
So all this time, my app users were on the server… but the roles were stored in a local .MDF file in App_Data. Ugh.