Active Directory COM Exception - An operations error occurred (0x80072020)

Question

I am getting an intermittent COM Exception \"An operations error occurred (0x80072020)\" (shown below) when I try and query Active Directory using the metho

Answer 1

For me, I ran into the same problem with trying to login to one of the domain controllers, I have 2 domain controllers, 1 of them is working and the other is not working, I believe it has something to do with the user profile, still investigating...

Answer 2

I had the same problem. I got success after changing the application pool as below: Process model load user profile = true

Answer 3

In my case, the web app pool was running as "DefaultAppPool" which did not have sufficient access to connect to Company's Active Directory. So, I impersonated an account which has access to AD in my code and everything worked fine.

Answer 4

I've now found another answer Unable to add user with CrmService API in Dynamics CRM which states that 0x80072020 is indeed a permission issue. I have changed my service to run under a domain level account instead of the local system account and this seems to have cured my problem.

Answer 5

The issue is often that the context for which the Active Directory calls is made is under a user that does not have permissions (also can happen when identity impersonate="true" in ASP.NET, due to the fact that the users token is a "secondary token" that cannot be used when authenticating against another server from: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f188029c-51cf-4b50-966a-eee7160d0353/an-operations-error-occured).

The following code will ensure that the block of code your are running, is run under the context of say the AppPool (i.e. NETWORKSERVICE) that your service or site is running under.

using (HostingEnvironment.Impersonate())
{
   var domainContext = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, "myDomain.com");
   var groupPrincipal = GroupPrincipal.FindByIdentity(domainContext, IdentityType.Name, "PowerUsers");
   if (groupPrincipal != null)
   {
      //code to get the infomation
   }

}

However, one super important detail is that all the code calling Active Directory must be in that block. I had used some code a team member of mine wrote that was returning a LINQ query results of type Users (custom class), but not evaluting the expression (bad practice). Therefore the expression tree was returned instead of the results.

What ended up happening is the calling code eventually evaluated the results and the An operations error occurred message still appeared. I though the code fix above didn't work. When in fact it did, but there was code evaluating the results outside the block.

In a nutshell, make sure all code to access Active Directory is inside that using block and the exception should be fixed one the service/app is deployed to the server.

Answer 6

This happened to me in ASP.NET (Windows 2008 R2 / IIS7) where I was messing around with Web.config and this error started happening on every FindByIdentity call. The root cause was that the App Pool was running as DefaultAppPool, and it started working again once I changed it to run as Network Service. I don't quite understand why it would get changed, but it did.