Unable to read Active Directory data from a web part - Unknown error (0x80005000)

[Arthur Penn]

I've read a number of other postings trying to deal with this problem,
but none of the suggestions worked. I developed a SharePoint 2003
portal locally and built a web part for it that reads user data from
Active Directory. It works fine deployed to the SPS server in our
domain--the DC is on a separate machine from SPS, and I can even cross
domains and read the user data from other trusted domains locally.

When I restored the portal at the client site and deployed the web
part, the part fails to read data from Active Directory and gets the
following error:

Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException:
Unknown error (0x80005000)

[COMException (0x80005000): Unknown error (0x80005000)]
System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)
+512
System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind() +10
System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.get_AdsObject() +10
System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher.FindAll(Boolean
findMoreThanOne) +198
System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher.FindAll() +10
Namespace.SharePoint.WebPartCode.findUsers(DirectoryEntry root)


Here are some relevant points about the environment and things I
tried:

1) The SPS server is a member server of the domain we are trying to
pull AD from, but is not a DC.

2) We audited directory info access on the DC the code should have
been hitting, and it does not log any entries when it fails. This
leads me to believe that it is a problem on the SPS server and not the
double-hop issue.

3) The SPS portal's web config has the following entries:
<authentication mode="Windows" />
<authorization>
<allow users="*" />
</authorization>
<identity impersonate="true" />

4) The domain the SPS server is in runs in native mode.

5) The web part passes credentials to the DirectoryEntry object to use
in performing the retrieval. We elevated the permissions of the passed
account to a domain admin, but this did not help. Relevant code
sections are as follows:

a) Get the DirectoryEntry object and pass the credentials specified in
the web part properties page:

DirectoryEntry root;
try
{
root = new DirectoryEntry(adPath,
this._adUserName, this._adPassword, AuthenticationTypes.Delegation);

b) Create the DirectorySearcher object and execute the LDAP query from
the web part properties:
DirectorySearcher searcher = new
DirectorySearcher(root);
SearchResultCollection results;
searcher.ServerTimeLimit = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5);
searcher.Filter =
"(&(objectClass=user)(objectCategory=person)(manager=*))";
searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("cn");
searcher.PageSize = 800;
try
{
results = searcher.FindAll(); // error occurs
here

Does anyone have any ideas? It seems that the code cannot access the
AD COM objects underneath the System.DirectoryServices objects on the
local machine, but I don't know what to do to fix it.

Thanks so much for your time.

 

[Stefan Falk]

Hello Arthur,

i have a very similar problem. Seems as if AD searching from ASP.NET works
only occasionally.

My setup is as follows: An ASP.NET web service should query AD about the
SMTP address of a user and send mail to him/her. My Windows XP development
machine with local IIS successfully queries AD on our Windows 2003 DC.
However, at the customer's site, the Windows 2000 IIS seems not to try to
query the Windows 2000 DC (nothing logged on the DCs despite logging turned
on). DirectorySearcher.FindOne simply returns nothing without any error
logged.

I have searched MSDN library to no avail. Seems to me as if many developers
have this kind of problem but noone has an answer.

Do you have something new about the topic?

Greetings,
Stefan Falk

 

[Joe Kaplan \(MVP - ADSI\)]

Can you post your code? Have you read this article?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;329986

These problems with System.DirectoryServices are generally caused by
security context issues and the use of default credentials and/or serverless
binding with a non-domain account.

Joe K.

 

[Stefan Falk]

Hello Joe,

have warmest thanks for your tip. I wasn't aware of the double-hop issue
mentioned in the KB article. In fact, i have no idea about why i haven't
found that article on my own. So thank you very much again.

Greetings,
Stefan

 

[Krish Shenoy[MSFT]]

0x80005000 is E_ADS_BAD_PATHNAME
# An invalid directory pathname was passed