Using the Client Network Utility to Resolve Connection Problems

Posted by arlene

A client network utility tool allows us to change the way that a client machine talks to SQL Server 2000.

On our installation all that is really available to us is TCP/IP, but on a Windows NT/2000 machine, we see several other protocols. The most common, other than TCP/IP, is Named Pipes. See Appendix B, “Installing and Configuring SQL Server 2000,” for definitions of these terms.

Occasionally you get an error that does not seem to make sense. Your Web site or client application is running smoothly, and for what seems to be no reason, establishing a connection becomes a problem.

Living the Web 2.0The ODBC driver or another connection mechanism will report an error that a connection cannot be made to the specified SQL Server. This can be because of several things; you will find that switching from TCP/IP to Named Pipes will normally resolve these connection issues for you.

You can specify a Named Pipes connection through either the client network utility or the ODBC driver manager (within Control Panel). So if you do start to get connection problems, try changing the protocol first.

Because this was written for SQL Server 2000 to run on a Windows 98 machine, the ability to change network protocols is not an option. However, we will take a quick look at how to change these settings for a Windows NT or 2000 machine. Something a little extra for the NT/2000 guys out there!

You will find the Client Network Utility within the SQL Server menu group in your Start menu by selecting Programs, Microsoft SQL Server, Client Network Utility. This launches a screen.

The first tab in the Client Network Utility shows which protocols are enabled for your installation. As you can see on the Windows 2000 machine I am running here, we have two protocols enabled, TCP/IP and Named Pipes. For a Windows 98 machine, we would only have TCP/IP enabled.

This tab allows us to configure the way we talk to the SQL Server. We can change the protocol we use by selecting an alias from the list, in this case WALT, and clicking the Edit button. This will give us a screen.

By changing the Network Libraries option from TCP/IP to Named Pipes we can get our client utilities (Query Analyzer, Enterprise Manager, and so on) to use the Named Pipes protocol to talk to SQL Server 2000.

Once again several other options are available within the Client Network Utilities screen, but they’re a bit beyond our needs. Changing this option should take care of any connection issues that you have.

The following are some things to remember about the Client Network Utilities:

  • You shouldn’t change the protocols unless you have an absolute reason to do so.

But there we have it, another nice and easy interface with which to configure SQL Server 2000’s tools!

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