If Things Go Wrong

What would you see if you had been denied access altogether?  You would have seen one of two things:

  1. The 401 followed by a response containing your authentication as we saw in this example.  This would be followed by another 401 and the process would continue three times until you were flat out denied access.
  2. The 401 followed by a response containing no authentication information.

This is important because this is what tells you if the problem is with the host or you!  If you send credentials (and you're sure that you send the right  credentials) and it still denies you access, the host likely has a problem.  If Wininet on your machine doesn't even send credentials, you've got some troubleshooting to do on your own machine.

That's it for this part of the tutorial.  Next time, we'll go over using Microsoft Fiddler, a powerful tool for troubleshooting HTTP issues.


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