403 Forbidden when access SharePoint portal site
September 1st, 2008 — ¥ong¥s
After we ran a content deployment job we seem to have this recurring issue where hitting the SharePoint site when one is unauthorized gives the generic 403 Forbidden message. So we found ourselves having to authenticate first (by visiting a backend list or manually going to the _layouts/authenticate.aspx page to bring up the popup to get the credentials…
We don’t know why the site would not ask me to log in to begin with; instead it goes right to the 403 error…
Solution
We added read access to the application pool user on the Inetpub directory to solve this issue. This may have been lost on content deployment or some other way. However it seems to have been the root of the issue all along.
* Thanks to Alexander who share out this issue.