.::: How To Troubleshoot ORA-12638: Credential Retrieval Failed :::.
Selasa, 29 April 2025

.::: How To Troubleshoot ORA-12638: Credential Retrieval Failed :::.

Thursday, March 14, 2013, March 14, 2013
Hi Friends, today i faced very nasty situation in establishing network connection with Oracle database.

I created a user as per request from application team and i got response that they are not able to connect. when analyzing i found tnsping is not working.

I started looking at tnsnames.ora and compared that with what is there in server and its same. so as next step i looked at SQLNET.ORA file and added following line to make sure both the machines are in same domain

NAMES.mqdefault_DOMAIN = klpcph.local

Still nothing worked. Then i tried telnet from client machine and realized that 1521 port is blocked at firewall level.

Once firewall team provided access, tnsping worked but it throwed ORA-12638 : credential retrieval failed error

You can download The Study Case & solution Lab Oracle & SQL Expert 

I found following line in sqlnet.ora file on C:\app\teguh.triharto\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\NETWORK\ADMIN

SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NTS)

Then i modified the above line as below and it started working

SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NONE)

this detail code Before Change
=================================================================================================
# sqlnet.ora Network Configuration File: C:\app\teguh.triharto\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\network\admin\sqlnet.ora
# Generated by Oracle configuration tools.

# This file is actually generated by netca. But if customers choose to
# install "Software Only", this file wont exist and without the native
# authentication, they will not be able to connect to the database on NT.

SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NTS)

NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH= (TNSNAMES, EZCONNECT)
=================================================================================================
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
=================================================================================================
 this detail code after Change
# sqlnet.ora Network Configuration File: C:\app\teguh.triharto\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\network\admin\sqlnet.ora
# Generated by Oracle configuration tools.

# This file is actually generated by netca. But if customers choose to
# install "Software Only", this file wont exist and without the native
# authentication, they will not be able to connect to the database on NT.

SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NONE)

NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH= (TNSNAMES, EZCONNECT)
=================================================================================================



Reason :

Oracle client attempt to use your current Windows domain credentials to authenticate you with the Oracle server. This could fail for a couple of reasons:

- The Oracle server is not configured to support Windows authentication
- The credentials you use to login to your local machine are not sufficient to allow you to login to the server.

ORA-12638 :    Credential retrieval failed
Cause           :     The authentication service failed to retrieve the credentials of a user.
Action          :     Enable tracing to determine the exact error.

In my case, it was the later. This failed because I was logged on to my local machine using my normal domain credentials rather than my administrator account.

Source http://pavandba.com  http://fakta-dan-unik.blogspot.com & http://teguhtriharto.blogspot.com

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