Cannot generate SSPI Context in SQL Server

Aman Raiyyani
Can't Generate SSPI Content by SQLOPS
Cannot Generate SSPI Context is a generic connectivity error you may encounter while working with SQL Server. One of our customer had a new installation of SQL Server and ran in to this error. After hours of head scratching, the customer emailed us with the error message and explained us the situation.

Any user trying to connect remotely to SQL Server using SSMS would get Cannot Generate SSPI Context error. Since this was happening in a production environment, we decided to help the customer by providing him detailed information as to what was happening and how it could be fixed.

Register Service Account with Active Directory

The account on which SQL Server service is running, needs to be registered with active directory in Windows domain. In many cases, we have also seen customers enable delegation for multi-tier application. This makes it little challenging to troubleshoot.

 
Install Kerberos Configuration Manager to fix “Cannot Generate SSPI Context”

Kerberos authentication is a secure way to authenticate client machines with service accounts on a domain network. To resolve “Cannot Generate SSPI Context”, you will need to register the service account in your active directory.

To simplify this issue, you can download Kerberos Configuration Manager for SQL Server to troubleshoot Cannot Generate SSPI Context error. This tool is provided by Microsoft and can be freely downloaded from HERE.

After the installation of this tool, you can select Connect from the menu item to connect to a remove server by providing server name, username and password. If you are troubleshooting a local server, you don’t need to provide user/password. This tool will help identify all errors related to ‘Cannot Generate SSPI Context” for SQL Server, Analysis Services, Reporting Services or Integration Services.

In some cases, we have also observed changes to security settings have helped solve this error:

  • Change security setting to Off:
  • Enable Rc4_HMAC_MD5 protocol

  • After making this change, restart SQL server services for the changes to take effect.

Note: Above practice is just one of the several thousands of audit checks performed by SQLOPS Risk and Health Assessment for Production Databases. Your investment is worth every penny! 100% risk-free with the money back guarantee.

Credits: https://sqlops.com/sql-server-risk-assessment/

Explore our range of trailblazer services

Risk and Health Audit

Get 360 degree view in to the health of your production Databases with actionable intelligence and readiness for government compliance including HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, PCI, ETC. with 100% money-back guarantee.

DBA Services

The MOST ADVANCED database management service that help manage, maintain & support your production database 24×7 with highest ROI so you can focus on more important things for your business

Cloud Migration

With more than 20 Petabytes of data migration experience to both AWS and Azure cloud, we help migrate your databases to various databases in the cloud including RDS, Aurora, Snowflake, Azure SQL, Etc.

Data Integration

Whether you have unstructured, semi-structured or structured data, we help build pipelines that extract, transform, clean, validate and load it into data warehouse or data lakes or in any databases.

Data Analytics

We help transform your organizations data into powerful,  stunning, light-weight  and meaningful reports using PowerBI or Tableau to help you with making fast and accurate business decisions.

Govt Compliance

Does your business use PII information? We provide detailed and the most advanced risk assessment for your business data related to HIPAA, SOX, PCI, GDPR and several other Govt. compliance regulations.

You May Also Like…