So the other day I was preparing to demo VMware horizon DaaS I was supposed to give the demo to a customer when I ran into some issues. I was welcomed with a nice Login failure: General authentication error.
Well that is a bummer. Let me tell you how I fixed the problem.
The Error message:

Finding the problem and fixing it:
Naturally the first thing that came to mind was that I typed in the wrong password and or made a typo. To be sure i copy pasted the password from my password manager and… nope same error message.
Well the next step seems obvious, reset my password. Maybe I made an error adding my password to the password manager.
So password reset it is. After the password reset i tried again… Nope still the same error message. The next thing I tried was using the fat client, maybe something goes wrong with the webclient authentication (sounds peculiar I know). Anyway still the same error message even with the fat client.
Here is where things get really weird, when I tried to login to the Horizon admin dashboard my password worked just fine!! Ok so my password works and authentication to the authentication layer (AD) also works fine.
Ok now I am puzzled and about to call in the support troops from our Ops department. But just as I was reaching out to one of my colleagues my focus was drawn to the assignments tab in the Horizon admin dashboard.
And low and behold, when examining the assignments I found that there was no assignment tied to my account. Could this be the reason for the error message?
I quickly assigned myself a VDI image and voila logging in worked again.
So there you have it no more: Login failure: General authentication error messages when logging in.
Final thoughts:
Just as a quick FYI, this is a Demo environment in which working with direct userassignments instead of groups is a quick a dirty solution. I recommend using group assignments instead of assigning users directly.
If you found this information useful please have a look at our other DaaS related articles here.