Site collection administrator cannot access site collection

Question

I just did a fresh MOSS 2007 install and have finished configuring the environment.  I can access Central Administration without any issues, but when I try to navigate to the newly created site collection, I am continually prompted for credentials which SharePoint never accepts (after a few attempts, I receive the "You are not authorized..." error). 

I am entering my username as DOMAIN\username.  I have confirmed that I am listed as a Site Collection Administrator on the newly created site collection though.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

try adding yourself in central admin to Policy for Web Application.  Give yourself full control

Answer 2

Just tried that - still cannot access site collection

Answer 3

Success!  This topic addressed my exact issue:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/d446b9a3-d18c-42d9-85f7-383d6b67af64

Essentially, I was trying to access the site collection from the machine where MOSS is installed.  I tested accessing the page from another machine and it worked right away.  To access the site collection from the server machine, I needed to modify the registry to disable loopback in order to view the page from the server (see link above). 

Answer 4

Just to add a little more information for what is a VERY common issue on the forums...

The access denied (401.1 status code) error occurs when attempting to access a custom host header or fully qualified domain name on the local server where SharePoint is installed. This is a security feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 in order to help prevent reflection attacks.

Unless you make a change to the registry to add the required custom host headers (or disable the feature completely, not recommended), authentication will fail. This explains why a lot of folk install SharePoint, create their first Web application with a custom URL and receive this error message.

This is explained in this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861/en-gb

HTH.

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Benjamin Athawes
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