thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Systems & Data Center · Advanced

Service Principal Name (SPN)

A unique identifier registered in AD that maps a service instance to the account it runs under for Kerberos authentication.

Definition

SPNs take the form service/host:port, such as MSSQLSvc/sql01.corp.local:1433. Missing or duplicate SPNs cause Kerberos failures and fallback to NTLM. setspn manages SPNs.

Example

setspn -S HTTP/web01.corp.local CORP\svc_web registers an SPN for a web app pool account.

Exam tip

Duplicate SPNs break Kerberos; setspn -X finds duplicates.

Related terms