Working on some Ant scripts and Oracle today and out of the blue I get this error:
ORA-12638 credential retrieval failed
Everything was working yesterday! I restarted Oracle and my workstation – no luck! Argh.
A quick Google however turned up a simple solution – simply modify your sqlnet.ora file. On my machine running Oracle XE this is located:
C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\NETWORK\ADMIN
And change one line:
Original Entry – SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NTS)
Modified Entry – SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NONE)
After I changed this I tried it and it worked – no reboot, restart required! Reading on the Oracle forums – apparently the “NTS” option tries to use your Windows credentials to authenticate with Oracle. So unless your Oracle logins match your Windows login – this may fail.
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The Oracle: Credential Retrieval Failed by Jim, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.




I had the same problem with Oracle 11g. This solved the problem.