Hello everyone.

IIS n00b here.

Last week we had a horribly corrupted defaul domain controller and domain policy which screwed with some of our member servers.  One of them was our web server running server 2003 enterprise + iis which hosts our intranet and a couple external sites.  we were able to access our external websites but not our intranet; we received page cannot be displayed.  we were also not able to log on via remote desktop.

We had to remove the webserver from the domain to a workgroup and then back to the domain.  we were then able to access our intranet and still our external sites FROM WITHIN OUR NETWORK.  We found out later that we could no longer access our external sites, we get a credentials user/pass windows and if we can cancel out we receive:

HTTP Error 401.1 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.

obviously there should be no need for this on our external sites.

i've checked the sites in iis and anonymous access is checked as well as windows authentication.  the anon account selected is iusr\webservername

if i check windows auth then the visitors will just get a page cant be displayed.

i am afraid there might be a group policy account that i might need to add but i have no idea if iis writes to these policies when it's first setup on the domain.

any thoughts on this mess?

thank you for reading.

ceez