I’m somewhat stuck. We have a database server which was set up and configured by a third party. It’s for a third party product so unfortunately we’re stuck with the way they’ve configured it.
Their brilliant configuration includes using the sa account to make a number of connections. For about a week now we’ve had connection failures filling up all our event logs, two every ten seconds. I have managed to identify that it is the master database this login failure is for.
It’s definitely the sa account accessing the master database. It is not an incorrect password (which is good, because we don’t know the sa password – and neither does the vendor, it seems. Yay…) because we’re getting error state 16 so I believe the sa account has some problems with the master DB.
It’s connecting to everything else without problem – I can see the connections made to all other databases successfully. I have checked the sa account permissions and I really can’t see anything wrong. I’m at the point of restoring the master database from a backup two weeks old and wanted to open this up to you awesome people out there in case any of you have come across this before and have any alternative suggestions…
Yours hopefully…
Summer
Edit: added a screen shot of my error below:
Well my first suggestion would be get the third party vendor in there to reconfigure and fix. They made the mess, let them clean it up.
Restoring the backup might work but it is critcally important that you 1. change the sa password and 2. do not allow the software to connect using sa. I would make this a deal-no deal item with the vendor. The vendor though is terminally incompetent if they did this and I would seriously be looking at their competition to replace this badly designed system.