Excel asks for Credentials in PAX when the CAM Authentication Service should get Credentials

[John Hammond]

Afternoon

I have a very perplexing problem where PAX authentication has suddenly stopped working for a user. Normal troubleshooting has produced results and I am hoping someone in the wide world of the forum has encountered this.

We are using PAX 72 with Mode 5 (CAM authentication)

Normally the user clicks on an Instance in the connection and his credentials are passed to the CAM authentication service (through IIS Cognos) and the return of validated credentials is enough to allow the user into the instance with the correct privileges too.

However recently for only this user the CAM authentication stage is no longer being performed. Instead Excel issues its own prompt and even though the credentials entered are correct they are not passed to the authentication service and Excel re-prompts ad-infinitum.

excelprompt.png (170.4 KiB) Viewed 617 times

Things i have tried

1. Re-install of PAX
2. Disable OLE in Excel
3. Log in to different instance or environment where the Excel prompt changes to point to the authentication service for that environment.
4. Getting the user to log in to PAW - the redirect in the browser works fine!
5. The user did not modify any Excel settings before it stopped working.
6. Tried other options and logging in with Domain qualified user and the email id

As always any help would be most appreciated. Thank you.

[John Hammond]

Solution

The user was attempting to login to the CAM authentication service with stored credentials which were out of date as the user had changed their password without the store updating.

Type Credentials to get Credential Manager and then Windows Credentials. Delete the credential and it will create a new one the next time you access PAX and the access will work this time.

[Steve Rowe]

Thanks for updating the group John, appreciated!