The health check was more or less a complete success. We didn’t actually have any real problems in our environment, though we were given some performance tuning options to resolve any that *may* arrive later. That said, the single most important piece of information regarding an SMS 2003 engineering task has been this:
“The SPN cannot be assigned to the computer container unless the computer that is running SQL Server starts with local system. There must be one and only one SPN, and it must be assigned to the appropriate container.”
This blog post references the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 811889 in which one learns to “troubleshoot the ‘cannot generate SSPI context’ error message.” We’ve banged our head for several hours now attempting to get a remote SMS Reporting Point working against our SMS 2003/SQL 2000 server. There are all sorts of conditions required to make this article applicable, but if you should come across this message – look no further than 811889. A big *sigh* of relief may be heard throughout CheckFree as I release a great deal of rage and frustration. It’s gratifying to resolve an issue that has tormented you, but it sucks when the resolution is really easy and under your nose the entire time. Ironically, both Brett F. and I discovered this article at exactly the same time – on separate computers no less!