What does HRESULT 0x80040E6B (SEC_E_NOTRUSTEEID) mean?

 
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SEC_E_BADTRUSTEEID SEC_E_NOMEMBERSHIPSUPPORT

SEC_E_NOTRUSTEEID

Exact value and result class

SEC_E_NOTRUSTEEID has unsigned value 2147749483 (0x80040E6B) and signed 32-bit value -2147217813. AllStat describes it as “Trustee was not recognized for this data source”. In this result, the provider accepts the trustee format but cannot resolve that trustee in the data-source security namespace.

The high bit is set, so this result is a failure HRESULT. Its facility is 4 (FACILITY_ITF) and its low code is 3691 (0x0E6B). These fields identify an interface-defined result family; they do not identify the provider instance, method, object generation or partial effects.

Contract boundary

OLE DB security administration represents trustees, owners, groups, protected objects and access-entry lists as separate entities. A syntactically valid trustee can still be unknown to a provider, and an allowed permission set depends on the protected object type.

Investigation of this result should start with the provider security interface, effective data-source namespace and exact trustee or access-entry structure supplied. Capture it before ADO, ATL,.NET or a database abstraction layer replaces the native HRESULT with a generic exception.

Evidence to collect

A useful this result event records provider CLSID and version, process architecture, interface IID and method, object correlation ID, transaction state and the immediately preceding HRESULT. When recording it data involving SIDs, account names, groups, ACL contents and protected object identifiers, use types, lengths, hashes or redacted identifiers rather than secrets or complete business data.

  • Evidence 1 for it: normalized trustee identifier and authority.
  • Evidence 2 for it: provider lookup result and data-source domain.
  • Evidence 3 for it: deployment or directory changes affecting the identity.

Conditions that specifically lead to it

  • Cause 1 for it: the account or group does not exist in the provider domain.
  • Cause 2 for it: a name is valid but qualified for the wrong authority.
  • Cause 3 for it: the trustee was deleted after policy was exported.

Diagnostic sequence

  1. Capture raw 0x80040E6B and symbolic it at the native call boundary.
  2. Identify the exact failing stage for it: the provider accepts the trustee format but cannot resolve that trustee in the data-source security namespace.
  3. Retrieve all OLE DB error records for it before another COM call replaces thread error information.
  4. Compare the live object state and provider-granted capabilities with the input that produced it.
  5. Reduce the operation to the smallest case that preserves the same security contract.
  6. Apply one evidence-backed correction for it and verify that the result is not merely replaced by a neighboring HRESULT.

Retry and recovery

Retry rule for it: retry after creating, mapping or selecting a trustee recognized by the target data source. A it retry is safe only when the relevant input, object generation, capability or external state has changed. Before replaying a modifying call that returned it, determine whether rows, schema objects or URL resources were partially created or changed.

Do not turn it into an unbounded retry loop. Preserve cancellation for it and use a fresh provider object when the failed call may have left local state ambiguous.

Corrective actions

  • Action 1 for it: resolve trustees against the target provider before applying ACLs.
  • Action 2 for it: use stable identifiers where the provider supports them.
  • Action 3 for it: handle missing principals as deployment drift rather than malformed input.

Practical scenario

A policy copied between environments names a group absent in the destination; mapping it to the destination group resolves the result. Keeping it with the method and object state makes this scenario diagnosable instead of reducing it to “database error”.

Developer and operations guidance

Code handling it should release COM objects in ownership order, retain per-row, per-column or per-property statuses, and log granted capabilities rather than only requested options. While handling it, opaque values such as HACCESSOR, HROW, HCHAPTER, DBID components and provider handles must remain scoped to the object that issued them.

Operational dashboards for it should group by provider version, interface, method and normalized failure stage. A it event must not expose passwords, tokens, full connection strings, unrestricted command text or raw row contents.

Difference from nearby HRESULT values

SEC_E_BADTRUSTEEID reports malformed identity data, while it reports a well-formed but unknown trustee. Telemetry and remediation for it should keep these outcomes distinct.

Official Microsoft references

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