Troubleshooting 18456 Severity 14 State 5

  • In my error logs I am getting an 18456, Severity 14, State: 5. Which a first glance would be a failed login due to user name, however the users are able to connect to the DB via the accounting application that they are using, so it isn't bouncing the user. All users are authenticating via Windows Authentication using a shared user group and adding the user individually doesn't change this error. I am tempted to just blame the application, but I wanted to check to see if anyone had every come across this phenomenon before or had any thoughts on where the problem might lie. The application seems to work fine and users cab read and write data to the database.

  • I've seen the same behaviour from a Financial Application that I used to support in a previous job. The application would attempt to login to the database with the first few attempts being unsuccessful. The vendor wasn't able to explain this behaviour.

    What's the name of app?

  • Watching the connection logs and running profiler, I realized that it was using several methods for connecting to the DB. One of these methods, passed the username as part of its windows authentication string, but since users were being authenticated by group not user, it failed, however since windows authentication doesn't stop on the first attempt, it will authenticate on the second attempt that looks up user permissions. In short it was a bad windows authentication script. The software is Access Your Biz, not a bad bit of software for the money. The good thing is I have direct access the developer, so I can get him to fix these things right away.

  • Please could you expand "...it was using several methods for connecting to the DB. One of these methods, passed the username as part of its windows authentication string...". I am having a similar problem and have run Profiler to extract logins. How do you discern one login method from another please?

  • To fix SQL Server Login Failed Error 18456 you can take the help of this link: http://www.sqlserverlogexplorer.com/fix-microsoft-sql-server-login-failed-error-18456/

  • Thank you for the link John Walker but I am looking specifically for the connection method information I requested expansion of.

  • Is there anything wrong with this string on a connection to a SQL2014 database please?

    --network protocol: TCP/IP

    set quoted_identifier on

    set arithabort off

    set numeric_roundabort off

    set ansi_warnings on

    set ansi_padding on

    set ansi_nulls on

    set concat_null_yields_null on

    set cursor_close_on_commit off

    set implicit_transactions off

    set language us_english

    set dateformat mdy

    set datefirst 7

    set transaction isolation level read committed

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