Troubleshooting a customer’s CRM 2011 setup failure, we almost were thinking it was machine account issue, so we rejoined the machine to domain last night. Sorry to say, that didn’t help.. So a little more digging…

It turns out that whomever installed SQL on that box (might be a VM image copy), failed to enter the service accounts when configuring SQL during the install, and decided to change the SQL services after the install.

The big issue with this approach is that SQL install creates the specific SPN’s for these accounts. So changing them after will work on the local box, but anything connecting via kerboros (not GP), will have issues trying to pass on the authentication.

The fix was:

setspn –A http/HostName Domain\Reporting Services Sevice Account

setspn –A http/HostName.domain.com Domain\Reporting Services Sevice Account

A quick restart of IIS, and now the CRM server installation can proceed. Enjoy!