Well, I recently had the pleasure of fighting with SQL Server 2008 Express and our VPN at the office. Now, going in, I had a great deal of difficulty finding anyone else having problems. The situation: we have an SBS 2003 R2 Premium Machine with ISA 2004 (ugh) with our application server behind it. VPN runs into ISA and RRAS. Now, these instructions assume you have properly configured ISA for your VPN, that your SQL server instance is configured so that it works on your remote machine and that you’re using the Advanced Edition of SQL Server 2008 Express.
So, after getting really frustrated by finally getting SQL Browser running on the machine and only having the machine viewable on the local LAN and not via VPN I gave up. This was after spending a few days poking the damn thing trying to get it to cooperate.
I tried setting up Hamachi on the machine (Hamachi doesn’t play nice with ISA 2006 as it turns out too) and this didn’t by-pass my problem either. So, after further battling with Aliases and attempting to see if CLICONFIG.exe could help, I found….the problem.
We’re using a named instance of SQL Server 2008 Express, and this, apparently by default, does not have a default set of settings applied to it.
So, to get it working I had to first ensure that the SQL Browser was running (there are plenty of instructions out there on that). Then I had to add SQLBROWSER.exe and the SQL Instance’s executable to the firewall’s exceptions list.
Once that is done, you open Sql Server Configuration Manager and click on the plus sign beside SQL Server Network Configuration. Choose the named instance from the list, which will show in the opposite area the 4 connection protocols for the instance. Make sure TCP/IP is enabled! Right click on it, go to properties. The next dialog will have two tabs, choose IP Addresses from the pair. You will see IP1, IP2 and IPAll. Make sure IP1 displays your internal IP address for the machine. Next skip to the bottom and under TCP Port, ensure that it is set to 1433.
Once that is done, click Apply and OK. Now on the left hand list, choose SQL Server Services. Right click on the SQL Server for your named instance and choose Restart.
Now you should be able to connect to your SQL Server via the Windows VPN.
Well, today lead to some very interesting discoveries…
I’ve finally determined what bugtracker to go with! After some debating and trying to find a simple solution to a variety of needs (talk about not easy….). I figured I’d try Trac. It integrates with Subversion and provides not only bug/issue tracking, but also a Wiki for information storage. Best part, I can make it work on a Windows machine (I’d love to HAVE time to learn Linux, but at this point having time to sleep is a higher priority).
Now, I did run into some problems though. My choice of Subversion was VisualSVN (www.visualsvn.com) and all of the instructions out there to get Trac to install along side it on Windows were both long and complicated (I’m sorry, but when you have so many dependencies with software provided by different developers…it makes life complicated). Somehow, along the way, I stumbled across a Trac install for VisualSVN 1.5 (http://www.visualsvn.com/server/trac/) which answered all of my problems. Though, needless to say, the instructions weren’t exactly correct.
For example, when it tells you to create a repository named MyProject, you can use one of your current repositories instead. When you perform the initenv on the trac-admin.bat, you can just name it after the repository you want to create the Trac environment for. Then you only need to point Trac to the proper location of that project’s repository and your golden.
Editing the httpd-wrapper.bat will result in VIsualSVN not loading (no matter whether it is the version they list on that page or 1.6). Instead, you edit the Windows Environment Variables and add under system variables PYTHONHOME and point it to the python location inside “C:\Program Files\VisualSVN Server\Trac\Python\” or you can create a copy of the Python folder from there and move it to “C:\Trac\” which makes it a shorter variable to toss in there. This will allow VisualSVN to still run without erroring out.
Otherwise, the instructions are sound and it will work with the latest release of VisualSVN. Next step…learning to write Wiki….. *shudder*