PROFILE 13 - Error 1385 Could not log in as ASPNET user

Brian Donahue

• Date: 12-December-2005 (Reviewed)
• Versions affected: 1.2-2.6

When ANTS Profiler profiles a website or service utilising .NET Framework 1.1 on IIS version 5, it needs to log on as the ASPNET account that would normally run the ASP .net code. Normally this works flawlessly when your web server uses the default ASPNET security account. If not, you may get the following message:

Error 1385: Could not log in as ASPNET user

There are many reasons why this would happen. The first is that the account information specified in your machine.config file (%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.net\Framework\v1.x.xxxx\Config\machine.config) under the processModel node is incorrect. It may contain an invalid username or password. Another possibility is that you have stored the information in the registry as an encrypted BLOB. (See http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;329290 for more information.) In this case, ANTS Profiler can't determine the username and password and therefore can't impersonate that user and you will need to move the logins back into machine.config as plain text.

If you have checked all of the above, check your Local Security Policy (from the Control Panel's administrative tools) to make sure your ASPNET account has the logon as a batch job right. Although ASP .net doesn't specifically need this right to run web applications, it is granted by default to the ASPNET account by default and is necessary for ANTS Profiler's ASPNET login to be able to profile web applications.

The path to the user right, from the local policy editor, is:

Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> User Rights Assignments -> Log on as a batch job