SharePoint 2010: Web part errors accessing external web sites

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Problem: Today a string a errors appeared on web parts within a customer’s sharepoint 2010 farm such as:

  • Error loading weather details. Unable to connect to the remote server
  • Check weather service connection. Cannot connect to https://weather.msn.com

Resolution: The fact that this ‘used to work before’ and that all of these problems appeared today  was very suspicious in regards to something in the network having changed. According to the customer no infrastructure changes were made recently. The customer was using NTLM so that was another clue that it could not pass through NTLM authentication. Fix was to bypass the local proxy via the web.config file:

<system.net>

    <proxy usesystemdefault="false"
      proxyaddress=https://proxy.contoso.com
      bypassonlocal="true" />

</system.net>

 

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