Visual Studio 2012 just started returning 403.13 in debug

Question

User-1842880510 posted

Hi All;

I have VS 2012 installed on my machine for a number of years. For the same number of years we've had IIS Express set up so that it could read certificate of smart cards and provide the information to the web apps in https.  For the same number of years my attention has been devoted to a particular web app, using different permutations of it from TFS.  There has never been an issue in running the app in debug.  It reads the cert's subject from cert_subject easily. There has never been an issue with access the Root certificate authorities certification verification.  I last ran this app from debug this morning. with no problems.

This afternoon I created a new branch, and got latest version.  I made some changes then I ran in debug to ascertain whether those changes were correct and satisfactory.  Instead I got a 403.13 error.  I ran the previous branch that I had run this morning and also got 403.13.   Someone else in my office did a get latest on the new branch and ran it in debug and it worked fine.

I checked the error in Bing and found an article at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/saurabh_singh/2007/06/09/client-certificate-revisited-how-to-troubleshoot-client-certificate-related-issues/ discussing it reporting that it was due to either the fact that the certificate showed up as revoked in the issuing authority's CRL (which is not possible or I would not be able to log onto the machine), or IIS was not able to connect to the CRL.  They said if you set CertCheckMode = 1 in the IIS meta base, to disable the CRL call, you could verify if this was in fact the issue.  In debug mode we are using IIS Express.  I was not able to find anything in the applicationhost.config  file that corresponded to CertCheckMode.   I also was not able to locate any place where it was being directed which CRL location to use.  I did a restart to in order to try to reset everything to where it was this morning.  I was able to successfully log onto the machine so I know the certificate is not revoked and the machine can see the CRL.   So I am at a loss to explain this sudden generation of 403.13 errors out of the blue.

Does anyone have any ideas on what may be causing this and how to rectify it?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

User-1842880510 posted

And now just as suddenly the 403.13 error has gone away!!!! 

What's going on here?

Does any one have any ideas?

Answer 2

User347430248 posted

Hi joeller,

is your issue is solved now?

or you can again reproduce it?

if it is solved then let us know about this.

if you can able to reproduce it can you provide the steps to reproduce it so that we can also try to produce it.

Regards

Deepak

Answer 3

User-1842880510 posted

No I can't reproduce it.  In fact I didn't do anything different than I normally do when the error first appeared. That is what was so troubling. So presumably then no one has any knowledge on what would cause this to happen without being able to duplicate it locally?

Answer 4

User475983607 posted

joeller

No I can't reproduce it.  In fact I didn't do anything different than I normally do when the error first appeared. That is what was so troubling. So presumably then no one has any knowledge on what would cause this to happen without being able to duplicate it locally?

Yes, reproducing an error is the first step in troubleshooting.  Since there are a few reason for the error, we can only guess without being able to consistently reproducing the error. It could be that the system (IIS) was temporarily unable to contact the cert authority for some reason.

See the following from Microsoft which explains the error and possible reason for the cert error.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/248058/error-message-http-403-13-forbidden-client-certificate-revoked

Answer 5

User-1842880510 posted

See the following from Microsoft which explains the error and possible reason for the cert error.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/248058/error-message-http-403-13-forbidden-client-certificate-revoked

Yes that information was what was discussed in the link I referenced above.  It was very strange because I was able to contact to the CRL directly even though IIS Express was not.

Very well.  It appears there is no reason to remain open.  I will show it as answered. 

( On a side note, I didn't realize that points expired.  I lost a significant number of points while we were blocked from accessing the forum. Now I've got to start building them up again.)