ASP.NET MVC 5 Membership with OWIN - Login functionality not working correctly under IIS 8

Question

As the title suggests, I am unable to properly log in to my web app whilst it is hosted on IIS 8. It works as expected using IIS Express locally.

The Provider returns an "Unexpected Error".

I have checked that the OWIN middleware is loading, as I am able to register a new user just fine. I can also see using FireBug that the AspNet.ApplicationCookie is being set for the session.

The problem seems to be that when logging in, I am being redirected back to the login page, as opposed to the page I requested. Is there something under IIS 8 Specifically that might be causing this? As i said, It works as expected using IIS Express locally.

I have root access to the server, and so can make any IIS changes necessary.

Answer 1

It seems the problem was related to my SQL server connection string in the Web.Config.

Apparently it would seem that I cannot connect to my instance of SQL server using a connection string where the host address is the local servers public interface. Switching the host to "localhost" did the trick.

What's interesting is how suppressed this error was. I only managed to find it after installing Elmah.

http://www.raboof.com/projects/elmah/