revenera InstallShield and Web.Config authentication mode="None"

 So, i came upon this uncommon scenario.

I had a very working InstallShield to deploy a Web API into IIS, after updating to 2020R3 i think, all of the sudden the deployed site was not functioning in the most bizarre way.

The API did have a couple of config./admin pages where it was working just fine, API connection to the database source was working fine as well, the connection test did include testing user credentials as well, but when i tried to use same credentials on an endpoint, i would a message that authentication was denied for this request!

to add to the mix, i had the same exact Web API on the same exact IIS and the same exact connection running from Visual Studio just fine!

so after many many hours of testing and smashing my head against the wall 😫, i found out the root cause, for some reason InstallShield on deployment was removing below line from my web.config included with the Web API app.

<authentication mode="None"/>

now that was half the way, the challenge was how to fix that.

i ended up trying to re-insert that line using InstallShield XML File Changes under SYSTEM CONFIGURATION, as following:

 

 

Make sure you target your app web.config and not the site web.config

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