SSIS Mapping Drives Authentication Issue

One of my guys Ray Sotkiewicz has been battling mapping a drive in SSIS, and determined the issue was with the user password, in this case a percent sign. Here is the email he sent on his findings.

After an “Inordinate” amount of time beating my head against the \\share authentication/credential wall, I’ve discovered that the password for Domain\Admin contains a “%” sign.

Problem:

Using Domain\User to map a drive to Share inside an SSIS package works when the package is executed inside Visual Studio.


That same step “fails to authenticate” and subsequently doesn’t map a drive IF the package is executed using a SQL Agent job.



I verified this behavior using my own account inside the package step that maps a drive. The SQL executed the package without error. When I changed my password to contain a “%”, it then failed.