FreeTDS and Microsoft SQL Server Windows Authentication - Part 1

I've been trying to get the Zenoss SQL Transaction Zenpack working so that we can use Zenoss to run SQL queries for specific monitoring purposes and ran into a few things that might be worth sharing.

Using tsql for troubleshooting

Zenoss, among many other tools uses pymssql to connect to your SQL Servers; and pymssql uses FreeTDS behind the scenes. If you can't get pymssql to work them you can go a layer deeper to see if you can find the issues. In my case I have the following configuration:

Fedora Server 23
freetds-0.95.81-1
pymssql-2.1.3

First off, FreeTDS uses a config file at /etc/freetds.conf that has a [Global] section and examples for configuring individual server types. This is important because you need to use TDS version 7.0+ for Windows Authentication to work.

If we try to connect using the diagnostic tool tsql (not to be confused with the language T-SQL) without changing the default TDS version or adding a server record in the config file our attempts will fail

To fix this you can either:
Change the Global value for "tds version" to be 7+ (sounds like a good idea to me if you only have MSSQL):

or you can add a server record for each Microsoft SQL Server and leave the global version less than 7.

The catch to second method is that when you do your queries you will have to call the name as shown in the config file (in this case us01-0-srs1) and you cannot use the FQDN or it will fail because it defaults back to the Global setting. This method also creates overhead in managing the list of MSSQL Servers in the freetds.conf file.

Either way, at this point you should have tsql being able to query your MSSQL Servers using Windows Authentication

Getting started with pymssql

To make sure that pymssql is working I threw together a quick bit of python that allows you to connect using Windows Authentication

It's basically a simplified version of the example on the pymssql web page, but will prove if pymssql and MSSQL Windows Authentication is working or not.

-------------BEGIN Code
import pymssql

print('Connecting to SQL')
conn = pymssql.connect(server='server.domain.com', user='DOMAIN\\username', password='Super Secret P@ssW0rds', database='master')

print('Creating cursor')
cursor = conn.cursor()

print('Executing query')
cursor.execute("""
SELECT MAX(req.total_elapsed_time) AS [total_time_ms]
FROM sys.dm_exec_requests AS req
WHERE req.sql_handle IS NOT NULL
""")

print('Fetching results')
row = cursor.fetchone()
while row:
    print(row[0])
    row = cursor.fetchone()

print('Closing connection')
conn.close

-------------END Code 

After filling in the details on your MSSQL Server you can simply run it and get the results

Part 2 will cover the Zenoss specific aspects of this...