Help: restart SQL Services remotely with SSMS without admin rights?

  • I'm trying to allow SQL DBAs to restart SQL Server service remotely through SSMS without giving them local admin rights to the SQL Server. I was able to give them permissions to restart service through GPO. If I give them Remote Desktop permissions to the server (not local admin), they can connect through RDP and restart SQL Server service, (which to me means they have necessary rights on the box), but they can not do it from SSMS - options are grayed out. What am I missing? I tried assigning users Logon as service right with no effect. Is SSMS only checking for local admin rights on the server and not permissions on the services themselves? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

  • SSMS doesn't always do a brilliant job checking what is possible before graying options out.

    Of course sometimes it has no way to check the exact permissions required, and so makes a reasonable guess. That is probably what is happening here.

    If anyone can explain why the 'export data' option is greyed out on a read-only database though, I'm all ears. 😀

  • So what is a proper way to let SQL DBA restart SQL service remotely? It's hard for me to believe that the only option is to give the local admin - MS is very much into "least privilege"...

  • My guess would be to give them a work-around set of permissions just sufficient to allow the service to be managed either via SQL Configuration Manager or some hack like an SC.exe batch file.

    You could also set up Agent jobs to do this and use the proxy account to give the required permissions.

    There are probably a million ways to this actually.

    Paul

  • Thanks, Paul. Since it looks like workaround is my only option here, I've opted out for remote desktop access configured through GPO. This way I can apply GPO to the new SQL server and it will give all necessary permissions to RDP in, restart services, and restart the machine.

  • From the OS'es point of view, SQL Server is a service; only local admin privs are enough to restart a service.

    I had a similar problem with another product, and I was strictly required not to give local admin rights for junior admins. The workaround I had to use was far from elegant, but quick, simple, and kept me from granting excessive privs - configure a share, grant modify rights to the jr.admins for that share, schedule a batch under priveleged account which checks whether there a file in the share; and if so, restart the service and clear the share; then instruct jr.admin to put the file in the share should a problem arise.

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