Custom Web Part's Active Directory connection only working from server

Question

I have a custom web part that utilizes a dropdown combobox with items populated from AD. While it used to work, now I am unable to see anything populated in the dropdown unless I view the web part from the server (yet using the same SP accounts).

Tweaking the settings of IIS Manager's Authentication actually allowed non-admin accounts to see the dropdown items, but still only when logged into that server. The same non-admin accounts still could not get the dropdown items to show outside the server.

This tells us that it may be a server level problem and perhaps IIS is preventing users from querying AD.

So far I have tried checking the following things on the server: system security and permission settings, windows authentication methods, re-deploying the web part, and restarting IIS.

Our VM server is: Windows 2008 Server R2 running IIS 6.0, SharePoint 2010 Enterprise

Also interesting to note that this dropdown works fine on our old server (same web part and same code). The server specs for that are the same as above.

Answer 1

I was able to find the answer. The dropdown was not set up correctly to connect to a Data Source. First code had to be added to reference the proper connection string in the .ascx, then the dropdown's DataSourceID needed to be set to the SQLDataSource object created from that connection string. After all this was synced up and the dropdown box configred to display the column from the query it was working.