WMS Anonymous User Authentication

Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

If you want users to be able to access content without being prompted for a user name or password, you can enable the WMS Anonymous User Authentication plug-in. When a user tries to connect to the Windows Media server, the plug-in uses the Windows user account that you specified in the plug-in properties to authenticate the user.

By default, the user account specified in this plug-in is WMUS_server. If you are using the WMS NTFS ACL Authorization plug-in with the WMS Anonymous User Authentication plug-in, you must provide that the WMUS_server account with Read permissions for any files and folders that will be streamed from a publishing point. If you want to use another anonymous user account that already has the necessary rights and permissions, you can change the user account in this plug-in from the default value to the user account of your choice.

When this plug-in is enabled it allows anonymous users to connect to your server. You can restrict the content that anonymous users can access by enabling an authorization plug-in. The authorization plug-in enables you to set different access control policies for content. For example, you could allow users to access only certain content in a publishing point by using the WMS NTFS ACL Authorization plug-in.

This plug-in can be enabled on a single publishing point on your server. By setting the appropriate access control lists (ACLs) for your content folders, you can ensure that the account used by this plug-in can only access certain content.