I had written a script a while back which would set the TCP/IP port for a SQL Server instance. Before you start throwing brick bats at me…. Powershell was not in existence in those days and yes…. doing the same tasks in Powershell is much easier! Phew… Now let me get back to my story!

One of my colleagues told me that the script was failing due with the following error message:

SQL_PortChange.vbs(52, 1) Microsoft VBScript runtime error
: Object required: ‘objOutParams‘

Now the above error is not the most intuitive of error messages considering the fact the object is being assigned a value in my VBscript. With a little bit of troubleshooting, we figured out that the RunAs Administrator (it can really catch you off-guard) option was not used to launch the command prompt.

So when running such VBscripts, do not forget to use RunAs Administrator option!

Now let us look under the hood a bit! I naturally was curious as to why the access denied message was not being thrown back to the user. I used Process Monitor to trace the registry activity of cscript.exe and wmiprvse.exe which actually works in the background to perform the tasks mentioned in the VBscript. I found that there were Access Denied messages in the Process Monitor trace but they were not being bubbled up to the user (see screenshot below)!

As you can see above, the access denied was on the SQL Server TCP/IP registry key and the WBEM keys. Since the registry key could not be read, the object was not created. And which is why we got the weird error listed above.

I thought this would be a good issue to blog on in case some one else ran into a similar issue!