Large Kerberos tokens cause WinRM requests to fail

Source: Microsoft Support

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Problem environment:

• Windows Remote Management (WinRM) installed on the client and server.
• Users security tokens that are > 16k due to the way their domain is configured.
• Client initiates a WinRM operation to the server (for instance WinRM id �r:<server>).

With WinRM 1.1 installed in client the following error will be seen:

WSManFault
Message = The WinRM client cannot process the request. It cannot determine the content type of the HTTP response from the destination computer. The content type is absent or invalid.

Error number: -2144108297 0x803380F7
The WinRM client cannot process the request. It cannot determine the content type of the HTTP response from the destination computer. The content type is absent or invalid.

For WinRM 2.0 may return a different error about a request header being too long.

In some domain environments the user may be a member of so many security groups that the security token used to authenticate the user to the server may be > 16k. This is causing either http.sys or WinRM server to reject the request.

Install WinRM 2.0 or above on the server, then modify the following two registry keys that are described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/820129

• MaxFieldLength
• MaxRequestBytes

Reboot the machine to make sure both http.sys and WinRM pick up the changes or restart the http and winrm services.

Note�The MaxRequestBytes field should not be made too large as it could adversely affect the memory usage on the machine. The default is 16K and this should be increased to maybe 20K to see if that fixes the problem before growing it in similar increments.

If these registry keys are modified but WinRM 1.1 is still installed then the problem will not be fixed, but it is likely that different error messages are returned to the client.

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