Minimum Privileges for Debugging Local ASP.NET

[Jonathan Van Eenwyk]

Hi all!

I'm trying to debug ASP.NET applications on my local computer, but with
minimum privileges? I've added my limited user to the Debugger Users group.
What else is needed to get debugging to work? I get the error message:
Unable to start debugging on the web server. Access is denied. Debugging
works fine (from what I can tell) when using an administrator account.

Thank you in advance for any insight!

Jonathan

[David Coe, MCAD]

Have you tried starting the application, then attaching to the ASPNET worker process?

The Debugger Users should be enough (SHOULD be...) but try the VS Developers group as well.

"Jonathan Van Eenwyk" wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> I'm trying to debug ASP.NET applications on my local computer, but with
> minimum privileges? I've added my limited user to the Debugger Users group.
> What else is needed to get debugging to work? I get the error message:
> Unable to start debugging on the web server. Access is denied. Debugging
> works fine (from what I can tell) when using an administrator account.
>
> Thank you in advance for any insight!
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>

[Jonathan Van Eenwyk]

Thank you for the quick response!

No, I'm not able to manually attach to the ASPNET worker process. I still
get access denied. But I have found some other things out. If I change the
ASPNET worker process to run as the same user as the one debugging, then it
works. But this requires changing machine.config (it seems). Using
impersonation in web.config doesn't seem to work. But from what I've read
it seems that if I grant the user "Debug Programs" privileges in "Local
Security Policy", then that user should be able to debug programs started by
another user, in this case the worker process running as ASPNET. If that's
the case, then I should be able to allow the worker process to continue to
run under the account ASPNET, instead of the local user, while the local
user will be able to debug the worker process because it has that privilege.
But this doesn't seem to work. I'd prefer to be able to grant this
privilege as opposed to editing machine.config, since the password would
then be sitting there in plain text.

This website referred to the idea of changing machine.config to get
debugging to work:
[url]http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfocus/focus-ms/2004-07/0004.html[/url]

This one talks about granting "Debug Programs" privileges:
[url]http://www.bluevisionsoftware.com/WebSite/TipsAndTricksDetails.aspx?Name=AspNetDebugging[/url]

Thank you again!

Jonathan

<David Coe>; "MCAD" <DavidCoeMCAD@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:02EF44E2-D1A3-4149-9D01-817ADFF7FC54@microsoft.com...

> Have you tried starting the application, then attaching to the ASPNET

worker process?

>
> The Debugger Users should be enough (SHOULD be...) but try the VS

Developers group as well.

>
> "Jonathan Van Eenwyk" wrote:
>

> > Hi all!
> >
> > I'm trying to debug ASP.NET applications on my local computer, but with
> > minimum privileges? I've added my limited user to the Debugger Users

group.

> > What else is needed to get debugging to work? I get the error message:
> > Unable to start debugging on the web server. Access is denied.

Debugging

> > works fine (from what I can tell) when using an administrator account.
> >
> > Thank you in advance for any insight!
> >
> > Jonathan
> >
> >
> >