[Aside] SPNs

Trying to get people at work to clean up duplicate SPNs, and came across some links while reading about this topic. 

From the official MSDN article: A service principal name (SPN) is a unique identifier of a service instance. SPNs are used by Kerberos authentication to associate a service instance with a service logon account. This allows a client application to request that the service authenticate an account even if the client does not have the account name.

Basically when a client application tries to authenticate with a service instance and the domain controller needs to issues it Kerberos tickets, the domain controller needs to know whose password to use for the service instance – is it that of the server where this instance runs, or any service account responsible for it. This mapping of service -> service account/ computer account is an SPN. It’s of the format service/host:port and is associated with the AD account of the service account or computer account (stored in the servicePrincipalName attribute actually).

That’s all!