Ports needed to connect to remote SQL Server Instance

I've been working with our System Center Configuration Manager Engineer in getting his Configuration Manager Distribution Points working after connecting to a Configuration Central Management Point. Everything has been working fine, except our Development Environment Distribution Point cannot connect to our Central Management Point (CMS) database.

We've been at it for a week. The CMS db is located on a SQL Server 2008 R2 named instance in our Production Environment, and the Distribution point is located in our development environment.

The following works when trying to connect using SSMS:
Server
Server\Instance,port

Does not work:
server\instance

This was driving me nuts as the distribution point uses server\instance to connect. And according to our Config Manager Engineer, there isnt a way to specify... which may or may not be true. So I did my due diligence and discovered that on a named instance, if using server\instance as your connection string, then the requesting server goes through UDP port 1434 to request connection variable data regarding your sql named instances.

We opened UPD port 1434, and voila. It works!!

Blog that helped me figure it out:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_protocols/archive/2007/05/13/sql-network-interfaces-error-26-error-locating-server-instance-specified.aspx

Installing Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 on SQL Server 2012

With SQL Server 2012's release this past April, we knew we would have to prepare for our future deployment of Microsoft Dynamics 2012 to run on it. We had successfully upgraded existing versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 supporting Dynamics 2012 to SQL Server 2012. But one thing we never tested was installing Dynamics 2012 directly onto SQL Server 2012.

I set up all the pre-requisites for the Dynamics AX. The DB successfully installed and then I got the following error on the AOS install:
An error occurred during setup of Application Object Server (AOS) MicrosoftDynamicsAX at port 2712.
The following error/warning occurred:Cannot find the object 'UTILIDELEMENTS', because it does not exist or you do not have permission. Cannot find the object 'UTILELEMENTS', because it does not exist or you do not have permission. Cannot find the object 'UTILMODELS', because it does not exist or you do not have permission.
Hmmm.... interesting as I know we've successfully gotten these running on SQL Server 2012 before. I did a bit of google-fu and saw someone listing as needing to run Dynamics AX 2012 patch listed as KB2680186. Luckily we had this in our share. I ran that update, and noticed that it didnt actually update a client, but rather installed an update of the "Installation Support Files".

Once that completed, I rebooted my server and voila. It installed.
-Victor


Edit: I had used version 6.0 of the Dynamics AX 2012 installer. Although I was able to proceed, I got various errors that I couldnt get past. I ended up undoing the AOS install and db install.

I then redid the AOS and DB install with version 6.1, which was patched to run with SQL Server 2012 out of the box, and lo and behold, IT WORKED!!!!!