torsdag 13 november 2014

SQL Server connection issues while installing CRM 2013

I had some issues installing a Dynamics CRM 2013 server this week where I got an error on the validation screen saying that the SQL server is unvavailable. This was very weird and none of the results I found on the web helped me resolving this issue.

The error didn't give much information about what was wrong more than the message "The SQL Server <servername> is unavailable". To add to the oddities I also got a message that the SQL Server Agent wasn't running and that Full Text indexing wasn't installed. Big frowns on this combination of errors. CRM can't access the SQL server but it says that the SQL Agent isn't running and that the SQL server is lacking Full Text indexing?

Right. I started by having a look at the firewall, which normally is the issue. Guess what, that was disabled so that wan't the issue. Next stop Google which led me to a blog post by Chris Cognetta. This made me rather calm since Chris has solved issues for me in the past. That post was about file sharing and that a service wasn't started, but alas, the Server service was started on the machine.

Now, another part of this is that it was the customer's server which was hosted by another company so I had little knowledge of how the server was set up, only that another application could connect to the SQL server so there SHOULD be a nice connection between the two.

Solution of the problem was found by one of the server technicians of the hosting company and was sort of related to Chris' blog post. The network card had the "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" option unchecked on the Ethernet Properties. Yet another piece of information I haven't seen in any IG.

Hopefully no one needs this info...

Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se