Remote connection to SQL server doesn't use the instance name

Posted by Max on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Max
Published on 2010-05-19T15:17:03Z Indexed on 2010/05/19 15:21 UTC
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I have a web server with SQL express 2008 installed. I was trying to connect to this from my local machine using SSMS. After enabling TCP/IP in SQL configuration manager, starting SQL browser service and opening up the firewall I still couldn't connect using xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\sqlexpress as the server name.

Finally out of frustration I tried to connect taking off the sqlexpress instance name to just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and it worked!

I'm really at a loss here as to why this works. What would happen if I installed more instances of SQL?

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