Argent Commander automatically queries your Active Directory, meaning you don’t need to setup special accounts with various rights and privileges for users in your enterprise.

In order to determine who you are and what you have rights to, Argent Commander invokes a Windows login prompt, once per “session”:

This login prompt appears when the IIS site or virtual folder has Anonymous Access unchecked.

However, some customers may find that the login prompt is never invoked.

There is one reason and two methods to resolve this.

The reason this happens is because Windows, by default, auto-authenticates for you for sites in the Intranet Zone when Integrated Windows authentication is checked.

When we say “auto-authenticate”, the browser automatically retrieves your current logged-in credentials, and forwards the login to the site without the login prompt being invoked.

While this is still secure in the context of the logged-in user, having a login prompt creates an extra layer of security when an administrator leaves his workstation unattended and goes out for a coffee break…

So how does Windows determine whether your site is an Intranet site or an Internet site? Good question.

It determines this via the URL structure:

Intranet Site Example	http://ARGENT007	(ARGENT007 is the server's name)



Internet Site Example	http://ARGENT007.argent.com

In the above example, the Intranet site is structured as http://X, whereas the Internet site is structured as http://X.Y.Z (a dotted URL address).

The browser automatically detects this and auto-authenticates if the site is determined as an Intranet site.

How To Resolve This

There are two methods — one is to create a site with a host header, the second is to use Basic Authentication — but this method is NOT recommended, and will not be covered in this article.

Creating A Site With A Host Header

By forcing the site to only accept requests from a dotted URL, the site pretends to be in the “Internet Zone”, which always provides a login prompt.

1. Open the IIS management console
2. Right-click and select Properties on the site that Argent_Commander is installed in
3. Select the Web Site tab
4. Click on the Advanced button under Web Site Identification
5. Click on the Edit button
6. Set the Host Header Name to a dotted URL that identifies this server in your domain.

If your corporate network controls its own DNS, a DNS A record should be created that matches the host header and the corresponding server IP.

For customers who simply want to test this on a local machine, they can mimic a domain by editing their host file, located at:

    %WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS

Now, the site will ONLY serve requests if the host header is detected in the URL, and a login prompt will always be invoked at the start of each Argent Commander session.