Blogs about data

Quota has an interesting question What are the best blogs about data?  with allot of good answers.

Possible mutations of a Gmail email address

The Blog Senseful Solutions has a good article on How Gmail Filter Email-Matching Works.

To quote them:

The default account you use (e.g. john.smith@gmail.com) will match all variations of your address. This includes dot notation, plus addressing, and using the googlemail.com domain.

Here’s a brief explanation of each:

  • Using dot notation: You can enter as many non-consecutive dots in your email as you want. For example, if your email is john.smith@gmail.com, mail sent to j.o.h.n.s.mith@gmail.com will still arrive at your account.
  • Using plus addressing: After your account name, you can enter the + sign and whatever text you want afterwards followed by the Gmail domain. For example, mail sent to john.smith+foo@gmail.com will arrive at john.smith@gmail.com.
  • Using googlemail.com domain: Any mail sent to your @googlemail.com will arrive at your @gmail.com address. For example, mail sent to john.smith@googlemail.com will arrive at john.smith@gmail.com.

Any of the above can be combined (e.g. j.o.h.n.s.m.i.t.h+foo.bar@googlemail.com will still go to john.smith@gmail.com).

SQL Server 2008 “Can’t Generate SSPI Context” error on remote connection

While trying to setup a remote connection to a new SQL Server 2008 installation which uses Windows authentication (aka Kerberos) I encountered this error:


Can't generate SSPI context

A good high level explanation of what causes the error can be found on MSDN and a detailed explanation can be found at Microsoft Support but neither article has any detailed explanation of how to fix the problem.

In my case, during install, I had the server start under my user name when I should have instead had it start under the Network Service group. This is a problem because when user Bob tries to log into the server remotely, my user (the one the server is running under) doesn’t have the necessary permissions to run as Bob so Bob gets an error that SSPI can’t be generated. To fix this I needed to change the user that SQL Server runs under to Network Service. To do this:

  1. Open the Task Manager and go to the Services tab
  2. Click the Services button in the lower right corner
  3. Sort by name and find all the SQL entries
  4. In the “Log on as” column you should see some of the services have a user name. For each:
    1. Right click and select Properties
    2. Select the Log On tab
    3. Make sure This account is selected
    4. Fill in Network Service in the box next to “This account”
    5. Delete both passwords
    6. Click Ok
  5. Restart the SQL Server

This should cause the server to run under Network Service instead of a particular user.

Some extra technical details about my setup:

  • The SQL Server was already setup to accept remote connections
  • The Windows Firewall was already setup to accept incoming SQL requests
  • The SQL Server was configured to accept incoming TCP requests