I created a brand spanking new environment, Server 2008 x64, SQL Server 2008, WSPBuilder, and Visual Studio 2008 Team Systems…All the awesome that you would expect out of a base development environment for SharePoint. I get to the Shared Service Provider and it keeps prompting me to authenticate repeatedly. I checked the logs and it looked like it wasn’t even passing credentials in the Event Viewer. I got that generic can’t pass the token or whatever error. So I thought maybe it’s related to a trusted site issue and add the site to the trusted sites. Of course that doesn’t fix the issue…Lame…
On a whim I decide it’s time to throw in the registry hack for DisableLoopbackCheck (http://www.information-worker.nl/2009/06/23/disableloopbackcheck-on-windows-server-2008/). I restarted my computer boot up Central Admin and hit up the Shared Service Provider Admin Page…Guess what…It passes my credentials and let’s me see the Shared Service Provider. Normally in this situation I see a 401 error or I get past this point, but the content databases will not start a crawl. So if you see multiple prompts on your Shared Service Provider and notice that credentials are not being passed you might want to try out the registry hack. I had this problem, because I decided to use the urn http://sharedservices instead of a server and port number. I hope this tiny piece of advice helps you out a bit.
In future I will be posting some information on how to build a roll up to list all site collections and sites within a web application. If I have some time there may be a nice little codeplex project that I throw out there, because John Alexander asked nicely and he’s cool. Until next time…