Login from an Untrusted Domain – Back to Basics

Remember When…

Back in late December of 2015, a challenge of sorts was issued by Tim Ford (twitter) to write a blog post each month on a SQL Server Basic. Some have hash-tagged this as #backtobasics. Here is the link to that challenge sent via tweet.

I did not officially accept the challenge. Was an official acceptance required? I don’t know. I do know that I think it is a good challenge and that I intend to participate in the challenge. I hope I can meet the requirements and keep the posts to “basics”. Let’s hope this post holds up to the intent of the challenge.

With this being another installment in a monthly series, here is a link to review the other posts in the series – back to basics. Reviewing that link, you can probably tell I am a bit behind in the monthly series.

Untrusted Domain

SQL Server is full of wonderful features and tools. One feature that is not wonderful and is blatantly frustrating is the error message that is supposed to help you understand why you cannot connect to SQL Server.

Login failed. The login is from an untrusted domain and cannot be used with Windows authentication.

Are you really sure the login is from an untrusted domain? I recently ran into this problem and found that it was less than helpful, though it seems basic enough in what the error should represent. When I encountered the problem, there was little useful information that pertained strictly to my problem.

Wait, am I saying that this error can be reported for various different legitimate problems dealing with logins? Absolutely, yes! Let’s recap some of my givens because these facts are important to troubleshooting the real underlying problem. Which in turn, causes this to be more of a “basics” type of post.

1. The server was joined to the domain.
2. The user in question was granted sa permissions to the instance.
3. The user can login to the instance locally without error.
4. My personal domain account could login locally without error.
5. My personal domain account could login remotely without error.
6. The user in question could not login remotely. Error thrown was the untrusted domain error.
7. The version of SQL Server was SQL Server 2014 Express edition.

Now talk about a head scratcher from the get-go. The problem only seems to occur when trying to login from remote. So, as an example, here is what I was basically seeing. First, the tsql to create my test login.

And with that user in place, let’s try to connect from a remote server to see what will happen.

Well, that is far from useful. I can definitely see that my user is properly created. I have more than adequate permissions. If the user was truly from an untrusted domain, the creation of the login would have failed.

As it turns out, there is something that is explicit to SQL Express with remote logins that generates this problem. Some have postured that the account needs to be added to the local administrators group. This is not accurate.

Better Solution

When you encounter this problem, there is an easy solution. Unfortunately it is not really a SQL Solution. Rather it is more of a sysadmin type of solution. The solution is to employ the use of group policy (either locally or a domain group policy). The specific policy that should be changed is called “Access this computer from the network”.

My advice here would be to use a domain based group policy if you have a bunch of servers that fall into this need. In my case, we needed to touch 120+ computers. Manually setting this GPO on 120+ servers would have been very tedious.

For a single server like this example, I added it manually as shown below:

With the account granted this permission, all that is left is simply to try and connect.

This is a great result. Now the account can connect and perform the work it was intended to do. In this case, it is a task account that would server as a proxy account to perform remote tasks such as performing backups.

Recap

Troubleshooting login failures is a core concept for the data professional. At times the cause of the login failure is far from intuitive. In this case, the failure is non-indicative of the actual problem. The real problem is that SQL Express does not like remote logins without a little bit of hoop jumping. Learning how to troubleshoot the problem is essential to becoming a better data professional.