SharePoint 2016 – Prompted for User Credentials – Web App

Recently deployed a SharePoint 2016 Farm into a Dev environment, which consisted of a 2x Web Front Ends, 1x Central Administration and 2x Application servers.

Deployed a new Web Application. Went to the Web Front End server and tried to access the new Web App and got prompted for user credentials.

The user logged into the server has Site Collection Admins permissions to the new Web App.

Authenticated using the credentials, but for end users this will be a major pain, as well as not getting

The reason this occurs is because the URL isn’t being classified in the Intranet Zone.

To check, go to the URL. Select File from the Internet Explorer menu then click Properties.

If the File menu is hidden, right click on the internet explorer banner and click File Menu.

You can see below under Zone that it is sitting in Trusted Sites zone.

Resolution:

In Group Policy, navigate to User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Internet Explorer Control Panel > Security Page.
Edit the Site to Zone Assignment List and add the URL into the list and set the zone as 1.
Then click ok.
By default it takes about 90 minutes for the Group Policy to be updated on the clients.
To verify, repeat the above process and confirm that the zone sits in the Intranet zone.

 

Patching SharePoint 2016

Pre-Reqs:

1. SharePoint Shell Access permissions on the Farm and Admin databases, as well as any Web Applications databases.
2. Farm Administrators within SharePoint Central Administration.
3. Local administrator on all the SharePoint Farm servers.

Install the SharePoint Cumulative Update on all SharePoint servers in your farm. Then run the below command on the Central Admin server first, then your application servers then the Web Front Ends last.

Command:

Run the command in SharePoint Powershell:
psconfig.exe -cmd -upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures -cmd secureresources

Note – if you have 1 unsuccessful configuration, sometime i find if you run it a second time it will work. This could be because there is a lock on the database or CA.

Rollback:

The only rollback method for patching SharePoint is restoring all the virtual machines in the farm including the Distributed Cache and Web Front Ends, as well as all SharePoint related databases.

You cant go to Installed Updates and try to uninstall it from there as you it wont allow you to uninstall.

You will find a tonne of issues if you only restore the databases. I know as this happened to me and it was near impossible to resolve.

Note, this is unsupported via Microsoft so only do it as a last resort.