I have several SQL Server instances. All of them are setup in the same domain, and have been working for years. One of these instances serves as an aggregator for the data of the others, and a sync service has been taking care of this for years. What was not setup before I got here was server maintenance, and centralized reporting from the aggregator.

To tackle this, I setup linked servers on the aggregator pointing to each of the other servers to enable central call to remote maintenance procedures.

The linked servers have mapped credentials using both Windows and SQL logins on both sides for various purposes, but now one of them isn’t working when I’m trying to set it up.

There’s a SQL login being setup on all servers with identical rights, let’s call it “Maint”.

The aggregator runs a job, which calls a remote procedure. The job uses “Maint” as the user, and the linked server passes this through to login as “Maint” on the remote server. These users have identical passwords. The job always fails with a login failure for “Maint” with the logs indicating mismatched password.

• The only other consideration is the job’s step is doing a direct EXEC call to the remote procedure, so “EXEC [RemoteServer].master.dbo.ProcName ‘paramValue'”, if this matters.

Things I’ve tried:

• Setting the passwords again using a copy/pasted string to the aggregator and the test server multiple times.

• Setting the Linked Server Properties to pass through current credentials, and alternately explicitly adding “Maint” to the remote login mappings using the copy/pasted password explicitly

• Logging in manually to both servers as “Maint” using the copy/pasted password, and had both succeed.

Any ideas on what’s causing the linked server functionality when run from a job go sideways like this? Other jobs work just fine.