Members of a local administrators group can access all portals and pages of a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 site, even if they do not have permissions for the portal areas

Members of the local administrators group on a computer that is running Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can access all portals and pages of a SharePoint Portal Server site, even if they do not have permissions for the SharePoint Portal Server portal areas.

This problem was first fixed in a hotfix that is now contained in a service pack. If you installed the latest SharePoint Portal Server 2003 service pack, you do not have to install the hotfix.

Service pack information

This problem is corrected in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 3. To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for SharePoint Portal Server 2003. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Hotfix information

How to obtain the hotfix

This issue is fixed in the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 hotfix packages 919175 and 898547. For more information about the English version of this hotfix package, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about the German and the Spanish versions of this hotfix package, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To enable the hotfix, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
   stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname denymachineadminaccess -propertyvalue 1
3. At the command prompt, type iisreset, and then press ENTER.
4. At the command prompt, type exit, and then press ENTER.

To disable the hotfix and return to the original behavior, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
   stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname denymachineadminaccess -propertyvalue 0
3. At the command prompt, type iisreset, and then press ENTER.
4. At the command prompt, type exit and then press ENTER.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

This problem was first corrected in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 3.