The normal NetBIOS ports needed for Windows authentication are not needed to connect to SQL Server via Windows authentication. The client passes the credentials to SQL Server through 1433 or...

Yup. If they don't want DBAs to see the data, it needs to be encrypted before it hits SQL Server.

Put an IPS or an in-line IDS in place. Snort can do this sort of thing especially with some of the add-ons that allow Perl type regular expression matching. You...

Removing the BUILTIN\administrators group is considered a best practice. However, there are some things to be aware of with Full Text Indexing and with clustered SQL Server instances. There are...

It's not BUILTIN\Administrator but BUILTIN\Administrators. The s at the end is important. That means it's the local Administrators group. When a user logs in and gains access through BUILTIN\Administrators, it...

In your %windir% directory there should be a file sqlstp.log. Can you post the last ten lines or so from that log? Please make sure that you clean up any...

Unfortunately, that is the answer if you're using TCP/IP as the network library. Windows Server 2003 blocks the TCP and UDP ports for SQL Server if it's prior to SP3.

This concern can be eliminated by either the use of SSL or IPSec, though. If you don't have a trusted network path, you want to do this for all traffic...

If it was struck by lightning there is a good chance of hardware issues. I would start there as you may need to replace the physical server.

Be nice to developers! Sometimes I am one.

It's also a violation of the Terms and Conditions for use of these forums:

7.6.2 You represent and warrant that any content you post, transmit or otherwise distribute through the...

Not without restoring the whole backup, no. What can be done is restore the backup to a temporary location and then move the data for the single table from that...

I'd put the percentage slightly higher, but not by much. However, the argument can be made from a security perspective not to use...

I don't think the hosting provider is being overly conservative. They are just trying to implement a best practice, if at all possible. However, if it's not do-able, it's not...

Basically, it's a single account. If any user has privileges to execute xp_cmdshell and that user is not a member of the sysadmin fixed server role, then the action will...