SQL SERVER – Configuration Manager – Cannot Connect to WMI Provider. You Do Not Have Permission or The Server is Unreachable

A few months ago, I wrote a blog which tells us reasons about why we should use tools provided with the product rather than generic tools. Yeah, I am talking about services.msc vs. SQL Server Configuration manager.

Why to Use SQL Server Configuration Manager Over Services applet (services.msc)? – Interview Question of the Week #112

Once of the blog reader reported below error.

SQL Server Configuration Manager
—————————
Cannot connect to WMI provider. You do not have permission or the server is unreachable. Note that you can only manage SQL Server 2005 and later servers with SQL Server Configuration Manager.
Invalid class [0x80041010]

I contacted him via email provided and he also shared the image of the message.

While searching on the internet, there were various blogs talking about below solution.

1. Find the *.mof file for SQL Server 100 (SQL2008) or 110 (SQL2012) or 120 (SQL2014) or 130 (SQL2016)
2. Use command “mofcomp” to compile the mof file.

We tried that and it didn’t succeed.

An error occurred while processing item 10 defined on lines 73 – 79 in file C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Shared\sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof:
Error Number: 0x80070005, Facility: Win32
Description: Access is denied.
Compiler returned error 0x80070005

There are two important things in above failure. Error message – “Access is denied” and the line number. If you get error for 4 – 7 then most likely you have not run CMD using “Run As Administrator” but if you get error for some other line (like we got for 73-79) then the problem would be something else.

SOLUTION/WORKAROUND

Since it was an access denied error, I downloaded and run a process monitor and looked for access denied. We found below interesting key related to WMI.

svchost.exe 1023 RegOpenKey HKCR\CLSID\{73E709EA-5D93-4B2E-BBB0-99B7938DA9E4}\LocalServer32 ACCESS DENIED

Now, we know the key which is showing access denied.

We checked permission and found that Administrator has full permission on the above key. But access denied was for Network Service account so we added Network service on the above key and then ran the above command (MOFCOMP) again. Since permissions were fixed, we could run the above command successfully. After that SQL Server Configuration Manager just opened fine and we were able to manage the SQL related services successfully.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)

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