Another Problem with CMS?

We had yet another baffling error pop up with Ektron's CMS400.net V7.0.X...

The content blocks displayed as expected until anyone tried to log into the system to make changes. Based on the logs the authentication was fine but the user was presented with the very unhelpful message 'the device is not ready'. This only occurred on our live production machine, the back up (running as a mirrored system) did not suffer the same issue.

I spoke with Ektron and they didn't have anything in their knowledge base, googled the problem and nothing came up.

4 hours of trouble shooting later we discovered a problem with the WSE 3.0 process hanging up. Killing the offending process immediately solved the issue. Long story short, restarting the machine would have been much faster than finding the process... but now its out on the net ... hopefully it will save you the headache.

Best Headline of the Day

With out a doubt the best headline of the day goes to Wired.com for "Raelians Rocket From Clones to Clitorises"

Fooling the Ektron CMS400 login.aspx page

This probably will not be of any use outside of our environment but, I'll post it for my own sanity.

When confronted with this error when using a coldfusion form to submit the login.aspx on the Ektron CMS400.net

Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that machineKey configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm. AutoGenerate cannot be used in a cluster.

The first thing to take a look at is the values to the hidden form elements that .net is kind enough to insert for state info and validation. These if these values are hard coded into your cheating login page then you will get the above error. (I would bet that this same issue will pop up anytime someone tries to submit a .net form)

Check __EVENTVALIDATION & __VIEWSTATE field values.