Instead of working, I blog.

I recently installed the latest Katmai CTP on my workstation at home. I installed the entire package. I connected to it just fine and worked with it for several days. I then went to hit it with an external client so I could load some data, but it wouldn't connect. I checked and it was set for remote connections, and it was listening on 1433 so that wasn't the problem. I didn't know if there might not be some kind of glitch so I burped the service from the Katmai Config Mgr. The service failed to restart. The message I got was that 1433 was already in use. OK, at least I have a message to troubleshoot now. Well, I've got Pinnacle running on that box and it uses SQL Express. So since I installed Katmai as a default instance as well, it was clear that Pinnacle was stepping on it... even though Yukon was on the box before and it never had issues with Pinnacle.

Anyway though... I stopped the express service and I still couldn't connect. So to make a long story shorter, because I spent a very long time on this, it turns out that the Katmai Control Mgr was falsely reporting the express instance as stopped when it was really still on. When I went into Windows SCM it was still running. So I stopped it from Windows and all's well.

At least I got some good troubleshooting practice in, huh?