Fixing the Sitecore Login Fail After Installing Sitecore 10.4.1 on a Developer Workstation
We were in the middle of a few upgrades to Sitecore 10.4 when Sitecore 10.4.1 was released on June 25th 2025. I used the Sitecore Install Assistant to install Sitecore 10.4.1 rev. 012149 (Setup XM1 Developer Workstation rev. 1.6.1-r7).
Both the installs completed successfully. I was also able to load the instances.
When I tried to login to the admin, I was seeing an error.
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The worst part is there are no logs generated in the Identity server and there are no error log entries in the Sitecore logs either.
If we disable the Sitecore Identity Server, it works fine but doing this causes other issues and it does not match up with the upstream environments.
My smart friend Kamruz then discovered the following in the developer documentation:
2.8. Encrypted communication with SQL Server
New versions related applications might require encrypted communication with SQL Server, for example Sitecore Identity Server module version 8.0 and later, and Sitecore Publishing Service version 8.0 and later. This change is due to the adoption of a newer version of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient that enforces increased security, as described in Microsoft’s Breaking changes in EF Core 7.0 article.
