Error: Kerberos Authentication Failed

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Applies to: yesVisual Studio noVisual Studio for Mac

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

When you try to do remote debugging, you might get the following error message:

Error: The Visual Studio Remote Debugger on the target computer cannot connect back to this computer. Kerberos authentication failed.

This error occurs when the Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor is running under the Local System or Network Service account. Under one of these accounts, the remote debugger must establish a Kerberos authentication connection to communicate back to the Visual Studio debugger host computer.

Kerberos authentication is not available under these conditions:

  • Either the target computer or the debugger host computer is on a workgroup, instead of a domain

    - or -

  • Kerberos has been disabled on the domain controller.

    If Kerberos authentication is not available, change the account that is used to run the Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor. For the procedure, see Error: The Visual Studio Remote Debugger service on the target computer cannot connect back to this computer.

    If both computers are connected to the same domain and you still get this message, verify that DNS on the target computer is correctly resolving the name of the debugger host computer. See the following procedure.

To verify that DNS on the target computer is correctly resolving the debugger host computer name

  1. On the target computer, open the Start menu, point to Accessories and then click Command Prompt.

  2. In the Command Prompt window, type:

    ping <debugger_host_computer_name>

  3. The first line of the ping response shows the full computer name and IP address returned by DNS for the specified computer.

  4. On the debugger host computer, open a Command Prompt window and run ipconfig.

  5. Compare the IP address values.

See also