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, 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/

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