Access denied - but only in one variant. How to determine the cause?

Question

I got a call from a user who was trying to access the English variant of our simple portal and was getting an 'Access denied' message. As it turned out, she really wanted the German version and was happy when that worked ok.

I would like to find out why she was not able to access the English variant. The error message contained no further information and the page contents for the en and de variants are very similar - if anything the English page is just a sub-set of the German page.

I checked the logs (standard settings) but could see nothing for that period. (Are the logs timestamped using GMT, server locale or something else. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong file)

Can anyone suggest a method to get closer to the cause of this problem? Is there any way to increase the verbosity of the error messages?

Answer 1

Is it possible that the pages in the English Variant aren't published?

If the user doesn't have permission to edit pages, and they access a page that's only in Draft they'll be told 'Access Denied' (or if they're not logged in, be asked to log in).

Answer 2

For testing user security and access issues, you can find useful the SUSHI tool: http://sushi.codeplex.com/