Question
What is HTTP Error '401 - ERROR: Access Denied'?
Answer
The HTTP 401 – Unauthorised response generally occurs when there is a problem with the credentials used or the completeness of the HTTP POST.
Actions:
- Please check the HTTP POST sent to the Digital Interconnect Hub, and ensure that the user details are correct.
Tip: You may want to capture a TCP dump (a .pcap file) to ensure that you have full visibility of the POST being sent. If any of the user details are missing, check your application to find out why the full set of details is not present.
- Ensure the application is using a POST request, and not a GET request.
- Check and confirm that there were no changes applied to your HTTP application or servers, which may have contributed to the HTTP 401 response.
- If the above checks do not show any cause for the HTTP 401 response, please raise a service request to the Digital Interconnect Service Desk, ensuring you provide the following details:
- Digital Interconnect Hub account details (for example, username/password, MT URL)
- Date/time when the issue started
- Any supportive documentation, for example, TCPDump, log file, screen shots detailing the response and so on.
Example:
From our Apache_access logs we can see the username ‘customerxxx’ is present in the first two examples which are shown as underlined in the example below, indicating a successful POST.
The HTTP 401 shows a ‘-‘ in place of the username, and therefore indicates that it was not present in the HTTP POST, therefore returning the HTTP 401 – Unauthorised response.
### Correct Submission - HTTP 200 OK
23.32.23.32 - customerabc [24/Oct/2012:17:31:26 +0200] "POST /customerabc/customerabc.sms HTTP/1.1" 200 171 "messaging.sybase365.com" 0
99.88.77.66 - customerdef [24/Oct/2012:17:31:26 +0200] "POST /customerdef/customerdef.sms HTTP/1.1" 200 182 "messaging.sybase365.com" 0
### HTTP 401 - Unauthorised
11.22.33.44 - - [24/Oct/2012:17:31:18 +0200] "POST /customerzzz/customerzzz.sms HTTP/1.0" 401 477 "messaging.sybase365.com" 0
Note: The entries above are amended from real examples and so the IP Address and username details are not real, and is provided for illustrative purposes only.
For information on and the meaning of other HTTP Error or Status Codes check the HTTP Interface Specification or search for 'HTTP status codes' or 'HTTP error codes' in Wikipedia.
