SQL 2005 and Windows 2008

Having troubles running SQL Server Manager on your shiny new Windows 2008 installation?  Make sure you right click and do a “Run as administrator” on it.  Took me awhile to figure this one out.  Otherwise you’ll just get the error “Login failed for user domainuser.  (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18456)” even if you’re a member of the local administrators on the SQL box.

Yet another instance of where UAC sucks.

2 comments

  1. Can’t you turn that off?  I turned it off in Vista Ultimate with a registry setting, and set the shortcut to always run as Admin.  Works fine.

  2. Yeah, you can turn UAC off.  However, I’d rather not, and I’ve currently got 9 VMs running, so I’d like to keep consistency. 
    You can also get around it by adding your specific user to the sysadmin group in SQL instead of just relying on being a part of the local administrators group.  I think this is basically what the Vista thing does at the end of SQL 2005 SP2 install.  They need to update their SP2 binaries to have it say Vista and Win2k8 now 🙂

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