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Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
Jason Medero SharePoint MVP: SharePoint Space for all things SharePoint, OCS, RMS, InfoPath, and Office

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  • Jason Medero, MCP, MCT, MCTS, MVP (WSS) is a systems architect with a concentration in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and its related Microsoft technologies. He is a managing partner of B&R Business Solutions, a central New Jersey-based firm specializing in SharePoint and surrounding technologies, infrastructure, real-time communications (OCS), and application development. He is an active member of the SharePoint User Group in New York City where he sits on the speaker selection committee. He also contributes his SharePoint knowledge as a mentor for some of the popular forums (MSD2D, MSDN).

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So the other day I encountered this error when I simply tried to delete a personal site from a specific user.  Once I deleted this personal site then tried to recreate the MySite by clicking on the link I was receiving a credential prompt.  Even though I would input the password in correctly I was getting a 401 Unauthorized error after 3 prompts.  It didn’t matter if I clicked the Mysite link for a regular everyday user or for an administrator.  I suddenly could not access any personal sites!  Good thing this was a dev server!  Well let’s cut right to the chase and solve this problem shall we…  

 

The solution was to check the Mysite web application and see if any site collections existed.  The web application that is hosting your Mysites should have a root site collection and in a perfect world that root site collection SHOULD be using the My Site Host template.  So it turned out that yes the web application that was hosting My Sites had a root site collection but was malfunctioning for some reason!  I deleted the root site collection from the web application and now it was officially empty.  I then created a site collection in the My site web app using the My site host template (shown below) found under the Enterprise tab when creating a site collection ONLY.   I created the site collection at the root of the web app which in my case was http://mysite.domainname.com.  I went back to see if the “My Site” link was functioning again and how great it was creating a brand new My Site as expected.  Remember that earlier I deleted the My Site and wanted to create a new one but when clicking on the My Site link and was greeted with a credential prompt and then the page shown below 401 UNAUTHORIZED (shown below).  

 

Mysite Host template   401 Unauthorized     


So the tip of the day if you run into this problem when accessing Mysites throughout your organization is:  Re-create the MySite host site collection by using the MySite Host Template when creating your site collection in the web application that you are using to host your Mysites! I hope this saves some time for people when they run into this issue…and some hair on their head…o:p> Cheers,  
Posted 04-21-2008 6:22 PM by Jason Medero

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Web Hosting » Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites? wrote Web Hosting » Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 04-21-2008 7:24 PM

Pingback from  Web Hosting » Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?

vj wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 04-23-2008 5:28 AM

Hi,

I am trying to copy the entire production SharePoint default site collection (about 55 GBs) to a new NLB DEV environment.

   I tried using STSADM to backup & restore but the restore keeps failing after running for several hours.  Have you used this method to copy a large site collection before?

Could you please advice?

Jason Medero wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 04-23-2008 9:51 PM

Yes I have used STSADM to backup and restore large site collections 100+ GB of data.  What type of errors are you receiving maybe I may be familiar with them...

Rick wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 05-12-2008 12:49 PM

A while ago, i had to move my MYSITES log files (SQL 2005) to a different SAN drive on the SQL Server.  Doing so, broke my MYSITES.

According to a Microsoft employee blog, moving SQL log files on MYSITES does not work. Moving log files on other sharepoint databases works fine.

Have you ever heard of this or experienced the same problem?  I have been trying to get it working anyway, without their help but am not able to.  I am getting the same 401 error you mentioned in this post.

Thanks for the help.

Rick

(rking@royaline.com)

Jason Medero wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 05-12-2008 4:45 PM

I have never heard of this before.  The Mysites database should just be another content database.  Can you describe the process in which you came about this error?  Moving the content database SQL log files correctly should not give you a 401 error.  The 401 error generally means file not found.  Have you setup your SSP correctly to include this content database after moving the SQL log files?  

Hancy wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 07-17-2008 6:35 AM

Hi Jason, My problem is Mysite Host Always goes down and goes up again after IISReset. I tried Recreating the Mysite Host and the same problem occurs. I just Migrated the server to a 3 web front-end farm configuration and mysite starts to misbehave. I get the same 401 error when trying to open the mysite host. Oh, the OS is a 64 Bit Window 2008 server and MOSS 2007 is an Enterprise Edition,I would be very happy to solve this delimma.

Per Bjarte wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 09-17-2008 3:36 AM

You saved my day!

Thank you very much.

Per Bjarte wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 09-17-2008 3:37 AM

You saved my day! Thank you very much.

Roger wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 10-10-2008 2:36 AM

Thanks :-)

Scott wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 10-16-2008 6:22 PM

You just saved my ass, bro. Thank you.

Janice wrote re: Receiving 401 Unathorized when accessing Mysites?
on 05-15-2009 10:16 PM

Whoa...Thank-you!  I just migrated my SharePoint farm to new servers and this saved the day!

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