Sitefinity cookies and SharePoint access issues

I have an environment where we are using SharePoint 2010 for our intranet and Sitefinity for our Internet site. Our Sitefinity administrators are having an issue accessing SharePoint after they work with Sitefinity.

After accessing their Sitefinity administrative interface and returning to SharePoint they are being given a 500 internal server error. If I then go in and clear their cookies they can access SharePoint without issue.

Our SharePoint installation is using Claims Based Authentication with the STS and we don't normally have this 500 internal server error. It is only occuring after our users access Sitefinity.

My question is this, is there an authentication cookie (or any cookie of any kind) that would interfere with the Windows based authentication claim to SharePoint that is being issued by Sitefinity.

Thanks,
Patrick

Hi,

There is useful information that could be found in this article

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh147177%28v=office.14%29.aspx

It seems that the first site is a subdomain of the other site. Our suggestions is to go to the web.config file and find where we register this module:

SitefinitySessionAuthenticationModule

You need to inherit it and register the new custom module in the web.config file. The system should use your custom module, not SitefinitySessionAuthenticationModule.

You should verride InitializeModule, then call base.InitializeModule(context) and set:
this.CookieHandler.Name = "CustomCookieName";

This will change the name of the cookie for Sitefinity, it will not be the default FedAuth and
it will not cause conflicts. 

Stefani,

I think you misunderstood my issue. The sites are completely disconnected. Our SharePoint site is on prem here at our home office in Portland Or. Our SiteFinitiy site is located elsewhere and in no way connected to our SharePoint site.

The urls are as follows

Intranet SharePoint site - https://intranet.neea.org

Internet Site - http://neea.org
The only similarities would occur via DNS. Perhaps I have misunderstood something in your above reply. This is only happening on Client machines (internet explorer 9 to be exact) where the user has accessed the SiteFinitiy administration site, once that happens they get a 500 error when trying to navigate to our SharePoint site.

Correct me if I am wrong but I shouldn't have to write any custom configuration modules for two sites that have no interaction except that a client access both sites with the same machine.... correct?

Hello,

We have answered you on the support ticket you have opened. I will share part of our answer:

Whether your sites are connected or not, the browser will keep its cookies issued by instances which appear to share the same domain, thus, providing a probability for a client-side conflict.

I would suggest you to continue the communication in the support ticket you have opened. Once the problem is resolved you could share the solution with the community.

Regards,
Stefani Tacheva
Telerik