Deleting BUILTIN\Administrators

From: Sonya (sbennett@sytecpa.org)
Date: 11/26/02 

From: "Sonya" <sbennett@sytecpa.org>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 07:21:39 -0800

On the advice of "Admin 911 SQL Server 2000"
(Osborne/McGraw-Hill 2001), I deleted my
BUILTIN\Administrators account (an alleged security risk),
and set the SQL Server login account to a domain user with
system admininistrator rights. The author warned that the
SQL Server Agent would no longer start if the service was
being started with the sa account, and I made sure that I
followed his directions to change it to a domain user with
sysadmin rights. I stopped and started SQL Server, but
the SQL Server Agent wouldn't restart. After a short
panic period and a few different attempts to resolve the
problem, I was able to get the SQL Server Agent going
again. I first re-entered the BUILTIN\Administrator
account, but that still did not allow me to restart the
SQL Server Agent. I was finally able to restart SQL Server
Agent by going into the Services folder and restarting it
from there. So, I'm back where I started from, but I
probably aged considerably in the process. :-)

I suspect that the difficulty I encountered was due to the
fact that I am operating in Mixed Mode, and, even though
the Admin 911 author didn't specify, the directions he
gave were likely for operating in a Windows Only Mode.
However, I'm not even sure about that theory. I did try
the process out on my personal edition (which is also set
up in Mixed Mode)of SQL Server 2000 prior to making the
change on our standard edition, and the author's
instructions worked perfectly there.

One other odd thing that I noticed is that, try as I
might, I was not able to successfully reset the SQL Server
login to the desired domain account (with sysadmin
rights). It would accept the assignment I gave it, but
upon re-inspection, the account would always bounce back
to sa.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Sonya

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