So we’ve been trying to get one of the testing machines up on SQL 2005 with our product. After all, its still SQL, it should work just fine. Well it didn’t. We tried to connect with the Enterprise Manager using TCP/IP and it refused to work. We tried and tried and tried, but here’s the error we got:
TITLE: Connect to Server
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Cannot connect to TOWER2.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 — No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 10061)
For help, click: Here
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BUTTONS:
OK
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Long story short, TCP/IP Connections are disabled by default, because Microsoft thinks that no one uses it. Just dandy… Anyways to fix: Open up “SQL Server Configuration Manager”. Open up the two “Protocols” sub-menu’s and enabled TCP/IP. Also, on one dev machine it was listed as enabled but still didn’t work — so we disabled and re-enabled and it fixed it. YMMV. Make sure to restart MSSQLServer afterwards. Yay Microsoft — you fail again!