Severity 20 – Fatal Error

SQL Server Alert System: ‘Severity 20 – Fatal Error In Current Process’
DESCRIPTION:    SSPI handshake failed with error code 0x8009030c, state 14 while establishing a connection with integrated security; the connection has been closed. Reason: AcceptSecurityContext failed. The Windows error code indicates the cause of failure. The logon attempt failed   [CLIENT: 192.168.1.xxx]

With SQL Server alerting turned to for some of the more severe error messages, we often times see the following error popping up. At first glance it seems very threatening, and serious.

One common cause of this alert is connecting without the right domain credentials. For instance, your office is running on a domain, but you VPN connect and attempt to connect with SSMS to your SQL Server. When you connect you forget to include the domain name on your user login, or it assumes the local machine name of your home computer when connecting. Your login the fails because you didn’t include the domain name correctly when you were connecting. For instance connecting as Steve rather than MyDomain\Steve or Steve@MyDomain.com. If this is the issue, SSMS doesn’t let you specific the SQL login, it usually refers to the currently logged in user. One thing you can do is run SSMS as a different user.

You may be able to verify this by checking the logs to see if there was a failed login at the time that this event was fired.

-Steve Stedman

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