[sql] Could not obtain information about Windows NT group user

I am creating a SQL Server Replication using a script. When I try to execute

The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner (STAR\moorer7) of job L3BPT2M-Atlas-14 has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'STAR\moorer7', error code 0x5. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 15404)).

This is a job created by a script that defines replication.

How do I debug this?

I had to connect to VPN for the publish script to successfully deploy to the DB.

I was having the same issue, which turned out to be caused by the Domain login that runs the SQL service being locked out in AD. The lockout was caused by an unrelated usage of the service account for another purpose with the wrong password.

The errors received from SQL Agent logs did not mention the service account's name, just the name of the user (job owner) that couldn't be authenticated (since it uses the service account to check with AD).

For me, the jobs were running under DOMAIN\Administrator and failing with the error message "The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner (DOMAIN\administrator) of job Agent history clean up: distribution has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'DOMAIN\administrator', error code 0x5. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 15404)). To fix this, I changed the owner of each failing job to sa. Worked flawlessly after that. The jobs were related to replication cleanup, but I'm unsure if they were manually added or were added as a part of the replication set-up - I wasn't involved with it, so I am not sure.

I just got this error and it turns out my AD administrator deleted the service account used by EVERY SQL Server instance in the entire company. Thank goodness AD has its own recycle bin.

See if you can run the Active Directory Users and Computers utility (%SystemRoot%\system32\dsa.msc), and check to make sure the account you are relying on still exists.

We encountered similar errors in a testing environment on a virtual machine. If the machine name changes due to VM cloning from a template, you can get this error.

If the computer name changed from OLD to NEW.

A job uses this stored procedure:

msdb.dbo.sp_sqlagent_has_server_access @login_name = 'OLD\Administrator'

Which uses this one:

EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_logininfo 'OLD\Administrator'

Which gives this SQL error 15404

select text from sys.messages where message_id = 15404;
Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user '%ls', error code %#lx.

Which I guess is correct, under the circumstances. We added a script to the VM cloning/deployment process that re-creates the SQL login.

Just solved this problem. In my case it was domain controller is not accessible, because both dns servers was google dns.

I just add to checklist for this problem:

• check domain controller is accessible

In our case, the Windows service account that SQL Server and SQL Agent were running under were locked out in Active Directory.

In my case I was getting this error trying to use the IS_ROLEMEMBER() function on SQL Server 2008 R2. This function isn't valid prior to SQL Server 2012.

Instead of this function I ended up using

select 1 
from sys.database_principals u 
inner join sys.database_role_members ur 
    on u.principal_id = ur.member_principal_id 
inner join sys.database_principals r 
    on ur.role_principal_id = r.principal_id 
where r.name = @role_name 
and u.name = @username

Significantly more verbose, but it gets the job done.