MS SQL Windows authentication

Submitted by madvip on Mon, 02/04/2008 - 15:54.

One often encounters a problem when presented with the 'Connect to Server' dialog box - if the Windows Authentication is selected from the Authentication drop-down, the User name & Password area is grayed out and unusable. The domain user account the user is authenticated with is visible, but grayed out, and the password field is blank and unusable. The fix for this is the following:

1) Click start/control panel/user accounts/click on my user account/manage my network passwords:

* Make an entry for the SQL Server computer hostname... MyConnection
* Enter the specific domain account to connect with, and its password... DOMAINSERVERNAME\madvip Passw0rd

2) Launch SQL Server Management Studio with command line switches to specify the server and to use Windows Authentication (the domain user and password info is picked up for that server from the entry in step 1):

* "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\SqlWb.exe" -S MyConnection -E

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