If you're trying to install McAfee EPO (ePolicy Orchestrator) 4.0 and setup is failing when it tries to connect to your SQL Server with a variety of worthless errors, be sure that the server name you specify matches the result of this SQL query exactly: "SELECT ServerProperty('ServerName')". After hours of messing around, a network trace revealed that this was query the last thing setup issued before it failed. In general the query seems to return the SQL server's shortname, so, if you've done something smart like I did and provided the FQDN of your SQL Server to setup, setup will fail and tell you it can't connect or the port number is wrong or something else in that general vicinity.
Another thing I learned from my network trace – make sure the credentials you provide setup have sufficient SQL access to create AND drop databases. Setup tests its ability to do so by creating a database with a GUID for a name and then dropping it.
Comments, Trackbacks, & Pingbacks
#1 re: McAfee EPO Setup SQL Failure
Thursday, August 27 2009 3:11 PM by MartinT#2 re: McAfee EPO Setup SQL Failure
Tuesday, May 18 2010 8:50 AM by EricThanks. This didn't work for me though. I've tried everything. I have both a SQL 2005 server and a SQL 2008 server. I tried FQDN, <servername>\<instancename>, <fqdn>\<instancename>, <servername>, etc. I've tried installing SQL Express locally and using the same above strings as well as localhost and localhost\<instancename> even though it's the default instance MSSQLSERVER in all cases. I even have a crappy little DB tester application I wrote to test the DB connection and it works just fine.
All of this was done on Server 2008 for which the ePO 4.5 setup says it cannot perform the SQL Express installation. So now I'm trying with Server 2003. I'm not happy with this product.
Useful info. The often useless errors you get back when connections to SQL servers fail are at best amusing and often just frustrating.