People Picker attempts to use claim based authentication but the web application authentication provider is classic / windows

Question

We recently in-place upgraded our sharepoint 2007 to sharepoint 2010.

We were using Windows authentication in the 2007 environment and wish to continue doing so in the 2010 environment.

The authentication provider for all web applications (portal | central admin | shared services) is Windows (NTLM). [EDIT: To clarify, this is in classic mode for all web applications].

If we load the people picker to assign permissions in our portal web application, it displays the classic mode view and works just fine.

If we load the people picker to assign permissions in our central administration, it displays the classic mode view and works just fine.

If we load the people picker to assign permissions to a Secure Store Service Targe Application, we receive an error "An error has occurred in the claim providers configured from this site collection".

I am confused. We are not using claims based authentication?

When the people picker loads, we see the Claims Based view rather than the Classic mode view (See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg602068.aspx for differentiation).

Any thoughts on why the People Picker would be trying to use Claims Based Authentication only when setting permissions for a secure store target application?

[EDIT: Further info] This is in the error log:

02/10/2012 14:52:12.43 w3wp.exe (0x1304) 0x0E18
SharePoint Foundation Claims Authentication 8307 Critical
An exception occurred in All Users claim provider when calling SPClaimProvider.FillHierarchy():
The connection name 'LocalSqlServer' was not found in the applications configuration or the connection string is empty.
(C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Config\machine.config line 148).
084879fb-8d9b-4abd-be0c-aed55789601c

NB: I am not looking for instructions on how to configure claims based authentication. I am trying to figure out why People Picker is using claims based authentication and how to stop it!

Answer 1

Looks to me like there are some rogue configurations in your web.config. Did you ever set a custom membership/role provider manually or in IIS? Did you ever use FBA?

The error message you're getting looks like there is a custom membership provider set which uses a non-existing (or no longer existing) connectionstring for a local SQL server instance. So when you open up the people picker it tries to look up those members and fails.

I would check the web.config and verify the default providers and the people picker wildcards.

Answer 2

There are many blogs suggesting for configuring proper Alternate Access Mappings in Central Admin to resolve this error. Did you try that out?

To know how AAM's are configured please visit the below links -

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/Video/ff679917

http://sharepoint2010hosting.asphostcentral.com/post/SP-2010-Hosting-How-To-Configure-Alternate-Access-Mappings-(AAM)-in-Sharepoint-2010.aspx

Answer 3

probably you can try to remove PeoplePicker entry from web.config of your classic app