FAQs in the category: Security

Many Web sites these days use databases or text files to save information. To be able to save this data, IIS, the Web server, needs the required permissions to write to the disk or database. This FAQ will explain how you should configure your NTFS disk or database so your Web application can write to it.

It's important to understand the account that IIS is running under when you need to make changes to the security settings. If, for example, your Web application writes to files or to a database, you'll need to grant the correct permissions to the folder or database. Before you can change these security settings, it's important the know what account IIS is using. This FAQ details the various options available, both for "classic" ASP and ASP.NET applications.

You often need to make changes in the security settings of your NTFS disk, for example to allow your Web server to read or write to certain files. You make these changes on the Security tab of the Properties dialog for the file or folder you are working with. However, on a Windows XP computer that is not part of a network, this tab is often not visible. Follow these steps to enable this tab.

If you're working with files (creating, copying, deleting etc) in your ASP applications, you have probably configured the permissions for the IUSR_MachineName account so it is allowed to write to the folder where your files reside. However, if you want to write to a folder on another machine you'll run into problems. This FAQ describes a few common scenarios to overcome these problems.

When you're working with ASP or ASP.NET applications and a Microsoft Access database, you're likely to run into an error like this:

Alternatively, you may get this error instead:

Both errors basically mean the same: the account that your Web server is running under does not have the necessary permissions to read from or write to the database.

This article will explain the steps you need to perform to fix this problem. First I will explain how you can find out the current account that the Web server is using to connect to the database. In the second part of the article I'll explain how to change the security settings so the Web server can successfully access the database.