Contribute cannot verify your connection information

[cs@tradepulse]

I am having a strange issue. I have my website on one Windows 2003 server,
Contribute installed on another. Both machines are networked and I have
administrator access. My problem is that when I try to set up a connection to
the website using Local/Network option, Contribute gives me a "Cannot verify
your connection information" error. I have tried making the connection with a
standard shared path, e.g. \\Server1\website as well as mapping the network
share to a local drive letter.

What does work is when I specify the complete network path, including drive
letter, e.g. \\Server1\D$\website

The problem is that in order to map this connection using the drive letter for
other users, they all need Administrator access. That's a major security
problem.

Has anyone else run into this problem and is there any solution to get
Contribute to recognize virtual share paths?

[raelehman]

I'm having a similar connection issue. Using Dreamweaver / Contribute CS4 on
Windows, I also have users using Contribute 3.1 on Mac. I mainly administer in
DW but sometimes use Contribute for things that can't be done in Dreamweaver.

During development of our site we had it on a separate subdomain from our main
business application, and connection was never a problem. When we launched the
site we kept all the files in the same place we did for development (a separate
folder in the web root from our secure business application which shares the
same domain/url). We use virtual folders in IIS to point to the appropriate
website directories for the pages on the website, so that our application is in
one directory and our site is in another, and it's all routed through the same
URL and home page. For the first week, everything worked fine.

Then my Contribute users started getting connection problems, Contribute would
say that they couldn't edit certain pages. When I triy to administer the site
in Dreamweaver, I get an error saying that Dreamweaver can't connect to the
server. However my normal FTP connection works fine.
When I try to setting up a connection with Contribute, after I enter my
username and password, etc it initially connects fine and I can browse the
server. But when I choose the folder where my website files are located,
Contribute again says it cannot connect. The part that mystifies me is that
this was all working fine at one point not too long ago!

I've tried recreating the connection, deleting the contribute.xml file on the
server, and all sorts of variations on the remote folder path. I'm using SFTP.
Basically, I can now do nothing with Contribute on the site.

Can anyone offer any insight? Are the virtual directories the problem? Or
might it be something else? I really appreciate any help, my users are getting
tired of not being able to edit the site and I'm tired of doing it for them :)

[write...@gmail.com]

I know this thread is a bit old, but I was seeing the same issue and resolved it using a different approach. It seems that the “Contribute cannot verify your connection information” error is Contribute's "go to" error when anything bad happens. Thanks for the in-depth error message, Adobe. In my case, this was happening during the middle of a server migration. The issue was that Contribute basically asks for 3 pieces of information to get you started:

1. The web URL for you site (which should look like http://www.contributeisterrible.com
2. The method you wish to use to connect (Network, FTP, SFTP)
3. The path to your website (on a network, this might look like \\mywebserver.contibuteisterrible.com\wwwroot , whereas on an FTP/SFTP sever, you'd specify the name or IP of the SFTP/FTP server and provide a valid username and password)

Here's the kicker...Contribute seems to care FAR TOO MUCH about the IP addresses returned during this process. So, in my case (IP addresses have been changed to protect the innocent and all that good stuff), my website was still living on 192.168.10.100, but the site files I wanted to start editing were living on 192.168.10.150. Contribute won't allow this.

To see if this is your problem when trying to set up a connection, do the following:

1. Open a command prompt and ping your website's URL and see what IP is returned (in my example, that would be "ping www.contributeisterrible.com")
2. In the same command prompt, ping the server holding your files and see what IP is returned (in my example, that would be "ping mywebserver.contributeisterrible.com")
3. The IP's returned from steps 1 and 2 must be the same...if they aren't, Contribute won't connect to the site
4. If you're trying to set up an "FTP/SFTP" connection, you'll need to know the name of the server holding your web files...this may or may not be the same as the name of your FTP/SFTP server (in most cases, it isn't since many places separate FTP/SFTP away from web content and web application servers)

If for some legitimate reason the IP's are different (for example, you have a webserver with multiple NIC's or IP's, or you're in the middle of a server migration, or you just want to test something, or DNS is configured such that the web URL returns a different IP than the server name), you can rectify the difference by tweaking your HOSTS file (in Win7, it's at C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc). Just add entries similar to the following:

192.168.10.100 www.contributeisterrible.com
192.168.10.100 mywebserver.contributeisterrible.com

This will force your computer to see both the server share and the site URL at the same IP address and resolve the issue.

If this doesn't fix ya, well...sorry :(