SQL Server - Invalid Argument Supplied - sql-server

So we have SQL Server 2008 R2 Express running on a local server, and a bunch of machines on the same LAN use a program I wrote in C# to access said server.
All the machines in the building except one can connect quite happily.
Connection string is:
Data Source=[IP address here],53535\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=EMS_Main;;User ID=EMSUser;Password=[password here];
Exact error message is:
"A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - An invalid argument was supplied.)"
Struggling to believe the 'invalid argument' bit, given that all other machines connect quite happily.
SQSL is definitely configured to accept remote connections, instance name is definitely correct.
The problem machine can connect using SQLSMS, but not via C#.
Disabling firewall on the problem machine makes no difference.
Everything seems to have been working fine on the problem machine up until a Windows 10 update a couple of days ago.
EDIT: An update on this: I now have two machines with this issue, and they both seem to have only developed it after Windows 10 updated to version 1803. All the pre-1803 machines still work fine.
Can anyone shed any more light on this please?

For anyone else hitting this issue, I discovered that this was happening because the client application was being run from a shared drive, and Windows 10 update 1803 must have some security update in it that causes this problem (only machines running 1803 were affected).
Running the application from the machine's hard drive solved the problem.
I'd still like to know a technical explanation for this, even though the problem is solved.

I have the same issue. A dig deeper and discovered that this happened after installing an update (May 8, 2018—KB4103721). Try to uninstall this update or use named pipes instead tcp.

Related

No data connection after cloning ASP MVC project to different computer

I was working on an ASP.NET MVC5 application and pushed it to git. Someone else cloned the project to their computer.
When they try to run the app it works up until there is a database call. They get the error message:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: 'A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)'
In the Server Explorer we can see that the connection is closed. We also see no tables at all, like as if there was no database.
Does anyone know how we can approach this? I'd think that the connection string remains the same on each machine? The database was created code first, do we somehow have to recreate it? If so, how?
Thanks for your suggestions!
The connection string should be the same.
You should first disable Windows Firewall and antivirus programs (and similars), if they're present, and test again.
You should try a connection via another database client too, just to check if you are blocked someway.
If these attempts doesn't solve the problem, you can recreate the database for test pourposes, if you will. For Entity Framework, for example, search "migrations" term in Google.
The error is relevant. Obviously, from the computer hosting the cloned solution, the SQL server is not reachable.
If, in development, you used a local SQL Server (like SQL Express or Local DB), you must verify that on the computer hosting the clone solution you have the same setup. If you used a remote server, you must check that the server is available to the computer hosting the cloned solution.
In both cases, you can use Server Explorer to verify the db connection and access.
Unfortunately, there is no satisfying answer.
At first, we reinstalled Microsoft SQL Server. That alone did not help.
We did change the autentication from Windows Authentication to SQL, because the person working on that workstation still had the account details from the previous owner.
That alone did make the test connection successful. But then, we got another error when doing the "Update-Database" command in VS, which we solved by deleting a rogue migration that was there for some reason unknown.
Now it works - sorry for not offering a more concise solution.

SQL Server 2008 R2 stop working over local network (error 26)

I configured both my development computer and my staging computer to be able to access SQL Server over the local network about one year ago (and everything worked fine until today). Yesterday evening, the head of our support team made some major changes in our physical switches and router equipments.
This morning, I had no internet access anymore on both my computer. What a mess!
We were able to to solve that problem by changing the default gateway (I have static IP configured) on both my computer.
Now I can access my development database server from my staging computer using either: "192.168.1.58\SQLEXPRESS" and "JONATHAN\SQLEXPRESS", but I cannot access my staging development database server from my development computer using: "192.168.1.56\SQLEXPRESS" or "STAGING\SQLEXPRESS".
Still, I can access my staging database server on the computer itself using both ip and named pipe.
That problem kind of bugging me up since both my SQL Server are using the same configurations (note: my development computer works fine without "Named Pipes". Activating it on my staging computer didn't solve the problem.)
Yet, every time I try to connect, I get the following error message:
A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while
establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or
was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that
SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL
Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance
Specified) (.Net SqlClient Data Provider)
Both my SQL Server (SQLEXPRESS) (I log on as "Network Service" as suggested in some threads) and SQL Server Browser services are running (tried to restart them several time) and turned off my firewall.
I can ping my staging computer:
Access the shared file via the network (\\STAGING):
And even access it's phpmyadmin via my browser (http://staging/phpmyadmin/).
I have the feeling I'm missing something obvious, but I can't seem to figure out what. I guess I need some more coffee ha, ha, ha.
Thank you all for your help
I'll write the answer since nobody suggest that on the internet.
When I regain internet/network access on my computer, I selected "work network" on my development computer and "public network" on my staging computer.
After playing some with the physical devices, the tech. who made the change suggested me to check out on which network I was (which was the same network "Network 4" except for being public vs work).
According to http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-change-a-network-type-in-windows-7.html :
Windows 7 puts up your PC’s shields. Windows Firewall plugs almost all
its openings and protects its internal programs for being connected to
potentially hostile network.
But it seems to be a little bit more complicated than this since I had completely turned off my firewall on my staging computer. Beware of these additional public protections when configuring your SQL Server.

Unable to connect to SQL Azure with SSMS, LinqPad; SQLCMD works fine

I have been using SSMS and LinqPad both for months to connect to SQL Azure instances without issue. Suddenly this week, linqpad stopped connecting, consistently timing out and displaying this error message: "A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 0 - the wait operation timed out.)"
At first, it was just LinqPad. But soon after I started experiencing the same issue with SSMS 2012. It showed the exact same error message (slightly different dialog).
I've confirmed that this isn't a firewall rule issue. My IP has been allowed through the SQL firewall for months, and I can still connect using the same credentials using SQLCMD and I can run queries.
Any ideas? Why would SSMS and LinqPad both take a big dump while SQLCMD still works?
I finally found the solution to this (I think I may have found it via https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13420770/pre-login-handshake-error-connecting-directly-to-sql-azure). I installed some completely unrelated software about the time that things stopped working. As it happens, said software also installs - silently - some bundled software that leaves you with custom Winsock LSPs in place, which means the system is then afflicted by an issue reported to Microsoft and addressed in KB 2568167. Fortunately, I didn't have to manually remove the LSPs because I was able to uninstall the unwelcome software (Sendori!).
Did you look at the connectivity troubleshooting guide for SQL Azure?
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1719.windows-azure-sql-database-connectivity-troubleshooting-guide.aspx
Have you also installed .NET 4.5 recently/in that week time frame? Have you checked your SQL Connection to make sure that SSL encryption is off?

SQL Server: "a connection was successfully established with server....existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host."

Yes folks, it's this one again.
"A connection was successfully established with the server, but then
an error occurred during the login process (provider: TCP Provider,
error: 0 - An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote
host.)"
I'm sorry... I have Google'd this, I have read the other StackOverflow articles on this problem, and I have tried all kinds of suggestions, but nothing works.
Here's a few notes about what we're seeing.
This issue occurs occassionally in SQL Server Management Studio itself (doing any kind of database activity... getting a list of tables in a database, having a look at a Stored Procedure, etc)
It also happens in Visual Studio 2010 itself, when it is trying to get data from the servers (e.g. when creating a .dbml file, etc)
It also sometimes happens in our .Net (ASP, WPF, Silverlight) applications.
Our SQL Server 2005 & 2008 servers are all based on virtual machines in data centres around the world, and we see sometimes this error on each of them. But most of the time, they all work absolutely fine.
When the error does occur, we can just "retry" what caused the error, and then it'll work fine.
We think.. if we have an IIS Web Server in a data centre in a particular city, and it accesses a SQL Server in the same data centre, then we don't see the issue.
We think.. if we connect to the servers, and specify the UserID and Password to use, it causes this error much more frequently than if we just use Active Directory authentication.
Put all that together, and it sounds to me like some kind of network issue.
But can anyone suggest what to look for ?
This isn't a bug in our .Net applications, as even SQL Server Management Studio "trips up" with this error.
It's baffling us.
Just in case anyone else hits this issue, we finally found the solution.
Our company uses Riverbed software to compress data, when it's being passed between locations, and this was somehow causing some connections to get dropped.
Our IT gurus found a configuration setting which finally fixed this issue.
I believe there's a setting in there to turn off compressing results from SQL Server (or something like that). That fixed it for us.
It could be any number of network issues. ANYTHING that prevents the code from reaching the server even for the few miliseconds it takes to make one query.
it could also be the result of a failover. When we went from a single SQL Server to a clustered environment, we'd see this happen during a failover. In this case, it turned out to be our Connection Pooling. In essence, the SQL cluster has a controller and two servers behind it. A and B.
Say our web app is using server A just fine, Connection pooling creates a connection on both sides. The server is aware of it, and the web app is aware of it. Once the cluster fails over to the second server, the web app is aware of the connection but server B is not, so we get an error.
The point is, any possible cause of network issues imaginable may be the cause. DOS attacks on the server, man-in-the middle attacks intercepting and changing traffic. Someone trips on an ethernet cable and it's loose in the jack. You name it, if it can cause a connection issue, it could be the cause.
Your issue also sounds like one we had recently - we also have a virtual environment, wih software that moves VMs from one host to another as needed for load balancing. Every so often, we'd get bombarded with the same error. It turned out to be an issue with the NIC drivers on one of the hosts, so whenever a VM moved to that particular host, errors would occur.
It's really not a programming issue. It's an environment issue, and you need trained professionals with direct access to your environment to research and resolve this.
My problem was that I was inadvertently using a wireless network to connect to our network because the Ethernet cable was faulty. This after repairing SQL Server, running a Winsock reset as recommended elsewhere ...
I am experiencing the same issue and our app interfaces with a several Azure SQL DBs. I believe (same as you) I do not have a bug in the C# code to cause this issue. We've solved it by a simple for loop containing an extra attempts to try to connect to the Azure SQL again if the previous attempt fails and then run the query.
Most of the time everything runs fine but sometimes we can see the loop kicked-in and on the 2nd or 3rd time it executed properly without the below mentioned error. After that we see in the log file the error below for all the unsuccessful attempts:
A connection was successfully established with the server,
but then an error occurred during the login process. (provider: TCP
Provider, error: 0 - An existing connection was forcibly closed by the
remote host.)
Even though this is a less-then-pretty solution, it allowed us to run our app without interruptions. I know you've mentioned that trying to connect again (to introduce some connection-failure tolerance) solves the problem and unfortunately this is the only correct solution I found so far as well.
I should mention that we have tried many debugging strategies to figure this out. Right now it all points to the availability of the database we are trying to connect to i.e.: It happens if the number of allowed DB connections is exceeded. (or so it seems at this time)
Turn off your VPN
My Problem fixed by turn off VPN
It was happening in our code when we were opening the dbconnection for oracle and were passing DBtype as SQL in our database object.
in my case - the error was Microsoft first suggestion:
Client is connecting with an unsupported version of the SQL Server Native Client.
In our case, We got this error when we updated sql server to sp3. We were not able to connect to the database from SSIS package.
We updated the native client and configurations. We were able to connect.
link to download the native client - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=50402
Link for configurations settings and further troubleshooting - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/sql/sql-server-2008-r2/ms187005(v=sql.105)
Hope it helps.
Cheers!
Had the same type of issue. In my case it was a bit more complicated... I could connect to “ServerA” from “ServerB” via SSMS, but it would fail with sqlcmd. The error was the same:
Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0 : TCP Provider: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
I could also connect from “ServerC” with both SSMS and sqlcmd. The following are the versions on the VMs:
ServerA: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter / Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (SP3-CU10) (KB4025925) - 11.0.6607.3 (X64)
ServerB: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter / Microsoft SQL Server 2012 - 11.0.5058.0 (X64)
ServerC: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter / Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (SP3-CU10) (KB4025925) - 11.0.6607.3 (X64)
Bottom line was the “unsupported version”. I noticed a mismatch of “sqlncli11.dll” between ServerC and ServerB, so I copied it to the System32 folder. After this, sqlcmd worked like a charm. Below were the versions in my case:
Failed:
FileVersion: 2011.0110.5058.00
ProductVersion: 11.0.5058.0
Worked:
FileVersion: 2011.0110.6607.03
ProductVersion: 11.0.6607.3
I was working on 2 projects at the same time (on 2 different machines) and both used SQL Server.
When i disconnected SQL with 1 machine the errorMessage went away. Probably you can mess around with IP-adresses too to fix the problem.
In my case I was seeing this error intermittently from a .Net application connecting to a SQL server located in the same server room. It turned out that some of the databases had auto close turned on which caused the server to close the connections in the pool. When the application tried to use one of the pool connections that had been closed, it would throw this error and I saw a log message on the SQL server that the database it was trying to connect to was being started. Auto-close has now been turned off on those databases and the error hasn't been seen since.
Also, having auto-close on is the default behavior for SQL Express databases and these were originally created on an Express instance during testing before being migrated to the production server where we were seeing the errors.
this answer is for those how have this problem with Azure Sql server database.
It happens when you reach mat pool
first remove Persist Security Info=False from connection string
second check your database plan in azure portal and increase the PTUs of your database plan.
In SSMS "Connect to Server" screen click Options, then on "Connection Properties" TAB change "Network protocol" to "Named Pipes"
Try this -
Click Start, point to All Programs, and click SQL Server Configuration Manager.
Click to expand SQL Server Network Configuration and then click Client Protocols.
Right-click the TCP/IP protocol and then click Enable.
Right-click the Named Pipes protocol and then click Enable.
Restart the SQL server service if prompted to do so.
I have had this issue a couple of time already, and I've fixed by reducing the MTU size. Often 1350, 1250, etc on my network interface.

Intermittent SQL Server ODBC Timeout expired

We have a bunch of VB6 applications that access two different database servers (both 32-bit windows 2003, one SQL Server 2000, one SQL Server 2005). About every ten minutes or so, we are getting a few errors:
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][DBNETLIB]SQL Server does not exist or access denied.
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]ConnectionRead()
This is happening on more than a dozen different computers at random times. We also have IP phones that all run through the same network and those are not having any problems. We can also VNC into a users computer and reproduce the error they were getting, but VNC still continues to work. Email also works. It just seems to be an ODBC connection to SQL Server that causes the issue. The errors happen for both of our SQL Servers. We have scoured google, but haven't been able to come up with a solution. Is there anything we can try to diagnose the problem? Is there any fix out there?
Update:
We have no internal firewalls on either the servers or clients. We connect through TCP/IP via the dns name of the server (also have tried IP address).
One server has Windows 2003 SP2 and the other doesn't.
The strange thing is that it has worked fine for years and now all of a sudden these errors are happening. Nothing has changed on those servers for quite some time. That leads us to beleive it is a bad switch, but that seems unlikely since nothing else (email, phones, vnc, file server, etc) all work without problems.
Take a look at this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.
Some problems occur after installing Windows Server 2003 SP2
I would also suggest that you switch to an OLE DB provider. In my experience, it's faster than ODBC and more reliable too.
Connection Strings
Scroll down to: SQL Native Client OLE DB Provider
Are you using non-default instances? Or do you have internal firewalls?
We changed to "server.fqdn.tld\instance,port" to avoid this exact (IIRC) intermittent connection issue from clients behind internal firewalls.
Only SQL connections were affected.
We never did figure out why this was happening. We upgraded our server to SQL Server 2008 and the error messages stopped.
I recently came across a very similar problem and posted it here.
ScottE found the solution.

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