Question

I’ve created and installed a self-signed certificate test on my Windows 2008 Server. I’ve set Force Encryption to Yes and set the certificate to test.

I’ve exported and sent the test certificate to clients. They’ve installed it to the Trusted Authority store. They’ve tried to connect to the SQL server through the SQL Management Studio Express, with the Encrypt connection set. They get the following error:

A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 – No such host is known.) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 11001)

Note that they can connect to the server just fine through unencrypted connection and settings.

I’ve tried most solutions thrown out by google about this error, but I don’t think any of them dealt with encryption.

I’ve also tried this method, but I still get the same error.

I don’t have the Primary DNS Suffix set, if that has any affect on certificates?

EDIT: My goal is to somehow have an encrypted connection from remote computers to my databse, because my clients demand it. We were considering VPN, but there is no need for it, if this can be done on SQL server.

EDIT 2: The certificate “Issued” fields are set to local domain name (that’s not resolvable by remote computers). Could this be an issue? Can I somehow set the certificate to an external IP address, if that’ll fix the issue?

Answer 1

owlstead (in the comments) was right. I had to set the Computer name to the domain name and the Primary DNS Suffix to the subdomain name.