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Remote DAC And Vulnerability Assessments

Max Vernon points out a SQL Server Management Studio Vulnerability Assessment check which seems somewhat incomplete:

Certainly, you’d want to ensure the port for the DAC is not available to the Internet, but hopefully if you’re reading this blog you already know how silly it would be to open SQL Server to the Internet.

Assuming you don’t have the port open to the Internet, it’s very likely the DAC will not be of any use at all if you disable Remote Admin Connections as advised in the Vulnerability Assessment. My advice is to ignore this warning completely and configure the DAC to allow remote connections. Microsoft Technet has documentation about using the DAC, and says to configure it for remote connections by logging onto the server locally first, then configuring SQL Server to allow remote DAC connections, which seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Read the whole thing.  I agree with Max’s assessment that if there are some basic controls around your instance (like not letting SQL Server be Internet-accessible, putting SQL Server instances in a protected subnet, etc.), remote DAC is definitely useful enough to keep running.