For background we were advised that the SQL forum is the best home for this as it's a WID rather than service issue. We have two DirectAccess servers in a load balanced cluster (NLB). We don't carry out regular report exports so can't be sure when this stopped working.
On one server we're seeing the 18456 logon event, that's the one that isn't bringing back any report data. The WID error logs report the error for the interactive account and the service account - "Failed to open the explicitly specified database 'RaAcctDb'". I've used HeidiSQL to connect to the DB, fails with logon error (18456 in event log) on the one server.
I should add that each time I try to connect to the WID on the server reporting 18456 errors, the database seems to be constantly restarting. I did once connect and it said the database was recovering. I ran a query which seemed to work, however I've not been able to connect since.
The other server I can connects I can query the DB. However I can only see old data, nothing in the last 3 months plus hasn't been added.
I presume the WID DBs operate independently in DirectAccess and any reporting across the cluster simply queries both. Each appears to have their own local DB of a similar size, in this case 14 GB which probably needs to be shrunk and any legacy data pruned if that's possible. Our assumption is that because one of the servers has the authentication issue that should be the first port of call.
So we've checked for the updates that are known to break the WID and they aren't installed on either server. We've checked the logon as a service rights which are as recommended in a workaround and no joy. We would welcome any suggestions.