As for synchronizing the service master key between your primary and DR servers, I tried to cover this in the article, see section "Moving Encrypted Data to Another Server -...

I have to think about your 1st question. At first blush, seems to me that encrypt/decrypt capability goes with ability to control the key, so maybe not possible. ...

timothyawiseman and rbarryyoung: Thanks for replies. I'm not positive, but I think I like the idea of naming these users differently. Striving to be an excellent DBA....

Thank you StormNorm!!! I am impressed! And thank you for documenting your sources. I guess you ran into the same problem I did, but with more determination.

Darn. Well at least 2 of us have come to same conclusion.

When we start using "WITHOUT LOGIN" users we're going to have to abandon notion of programmatically identifying...

Maybe you can find a service that you can make SQL server service(s) dependent upon? I've never had this exact problem, but have worked around similar problems by adding...

Msg 17, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

[DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen (Connect()).]SQL Server does not exist or access denied.

I think your approach should work. The above error does not indicate a problem...

Only mentioned OpenQuery because wasn't sure what you were trying to do. Now that you've clarified, I don't think it's the right approach.

But the basic approach ought to...

I don't see how you're going to get multiple different @@servernames (as in the example), but this gets the resultset:

declare @OrphanNTLogins table ...

EdVassie, thank you for posting this! That was a very frustrating exercise, I wasted quite a bit of time trying various approaches (none of your suggestions though), and it...

I've had this happen, it can be fixed. Sad to say I just don't remember exactly what I did to fix it, was quite a while ago.

I...

Good call! I've used contig in last couple months, and it's right there in my Bin. But I did not think about it in this context--never used it...

Steve, thanks. I agree totally, am pursuing this right now. I'll post before/after results. I'll be surprised if fixing this makes a noticeable improvement, but there are...

Suresh, even though 3 yrs late, I want to say thanks for posting this!!!

I think openquery or openrowset should allow you to achieve same level of remote-ness as when using a different linked server.

See http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic259078-8-1.aspx#bm259842