Question

Ok, so I am trying to create a procedure that call an extended procedure. I am getting the following error:

Msg 121, Level 20, State 0, Line 0
A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The semaphore timeout period has expired.)

Even with the simplest test I get that error:

CREATE PROCEDURE Test
AS
BEGIN

EXEC xp_cmdshell 'dir *.exe'

END

However if I just run xp_cmdshell 'dir *.exe' by itself it works.

This is running on a clustered SQL 2005 server. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Are you getting the error when you CREATE the procedure or when you EXECUTE it?

If you get it when you execute it, then there could be some issue with permissions. Since in later versions of sql server calling xp_cmdshell is tightly locked down and by default not enabled in the surface area configuration, I could see a potential for this.

How are you calling the SP? If you’re using dynamic SQL, then know that it executes with the privileges of the caller, not the SP creator.

Do you need to prefix the SP with master as in master.dbo.xp_cmdshell?

Have you tried EXECUTE AS either in the SP creation or in the SP execution?

Also, in my experience, transport-level errors are sometimes not due to a problem with the server but a problem with the client caching its connection object past the time when the server has dropped it (thus invalidating the connection object). Given that you’re presumably running this within just a short time of initially connecting, it doesn’t sound like that is the exact problem, but could you be having some kind of proxy/firewall/net filter issue that is dropping packets because of detecting certain keywords in the packets? I know this is a long shot but I had to ask…