Recover sa account

Today, a friend from the office locked himself out of SqlServer 2008 R2 Express, somehow he managed to remove the windows Administrator account form the list of sysadmin accounts in the SqlServer express installed in a development server.

I thought there was no way to recover from a mistake a like that, but another friend found the way and gave us a link with the solution.

Basically, we need to stop the SqlService, and restart it in "single user mode" and "minimal config mode"

sqlservr.exe -m -r -s SQLEXPRESS

And the open another command window and run this commands:

osql -E -S .\SQLEXPRESS 
exec sp_password @new='changeme', @loginame='sa' 
go 
alter login sa enable 
go 
exit 

And that was it. Remember, without the special "-m -r" options, the osql commands will fail.

NOTE: In case your SQL Server is not configured to use Mixed Mode for authentication, you may also need to make some modification to the registry settings.

Basically you need to find the registry entry for the instance:

Default instance:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSSqlserver\MSSqlServer\LoginMode

Named instance:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\Instance Name\MSSQLServer\LoginMode

And  change the value of LoginMode to 2.

Administering an ASP.NET WebSite

Hi! One of my friends showed me how to access the ASP.NET Administration WebSite without calling it from within VS.NET:

• Create a virtual directory ASP.NETWebAdminFiles in IIS that point to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ASP.NETWebAdminFiles

• Open properties windows of the new virtual directory, make sure that it is configured to run with ASP.NET 2.0, and in Security tab, uncheck Anonymous Access, check Integrated Windows Authentication. After that, you will be able to connect to WebAdminTools using the following syntax http://localhost/ASP.NETWebAdminFiles/default.aspx?applicationPhysicalPath=XXX&applicationUrl=/YYY in my case, it is: http://localhost/ASP.NETWebAdminFiles/default.aspx?applicationPhysicalPath=D:\Tasks\Libranyon\Photonyon\&applicationUrl=/Photonyon

Although I don't recommend to do it, if you want to access WebAdminTool from other computer, open WebAdminPage.cs from (C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ASP.NETWebAdminFiles\App_Code) and comment the following code block

if (!application.Context.Request.IsLocal) {

SecurityException securityException = new SecurityException ( (string) HttpContext.GetGlobalResourceObject( "GlobalResources", "WebAdmin_ConfigurationIsLocalOnly" )); WebAdminPage.SetCurrentException(application.Context, securityException); application.Server.Transfer("~/error.aspx");

}

WebAdminTool still be protected by Integrated Windows Authentication, so you still some have some defense here. I have found this same instructions here, so I guess my friend got them from there.