Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

When setting up your FBA stuff , you add various settings to your FBA-protected web application’s web.config file such as Membership and Role Providers, Machine Keys, PeoplePickerWildcards , Authentication mode, Forms and connection string. It is also important that you introduce some of these settings to the central administration site and the default zone (The one that is using Windows Authentication). These settings in central administration site and default zone help you interact with your FBA-protected zone much easier. for example:

1) In Central Administration , you can define one of the FBA users as the secondary site collection administrator .

2) In Central Administration , you can define policies for FBA zone to override different access controls for FBA users.

3) In default zone , you can better manage permissions and access controls to various resources across the site for FBA users.

There are two important things that you should remember when changing Central Admin web.config file.

1) Always have a back up.

2) Do not include your role provider settings in the Central Admin web.config file. If you do so, Home page of central admin will come up with no problem , but when you click on Operations or Application Management tabs a login dialog box appears .No matter what credentials you provide , you will get an “Access Denied” Error.