“Adaptive Server is unavailable or does not exist”

Question

I'm attempting to connect to a SQL Server 2005 DB from my Mac using unixODBC and FreeTDS as I have outlined here. However, when I try to connect in to a different DB using the same setup, I get:

Connection Failed:[FreeTDS][SQL Server]Unable to connect: Adaptive Server is unavailable or does not exist.

Here is my freetds.conf setup:

[my_db]
host = 12.34.56.789
port = 1433
tds version = 8.0

And here is my odbc.ini:

[my_dsn]
Driver = /opt/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
Description = My Database
Trace = no
Servername = my_db
Database = MyDB

[ODBC Data Sources]
my_dsn = FreeTDS

I am still able to connect to the other DB I set up on this computer (described in my blog post linked above), so I'm pretty sure that the error isn't on the Mac end. I've verified on the server that I'm using the correct IP address and port. Any thoughts on what could be the problem, and if it's on the server end?

Answer 1

Responding because this answer came up first for search when I was having the same issue:

[08S01][unixODBC][FreeTDS][SQL Server]Unable to connect: Adaptive Server is unavailable or does not exist

MSSQL named instances have to be configured properly without setting the port. (documentation on the freetds config says set instance or port NOT BOTH)

freetds.conf

[Name]
host = Server.com
instance = instance_name
#port = port is found automatically, don't define explicitly
tds version = 8.0
client charset = UTF-8

And in odbc.ini just because you can set Port, DON'T when you are using a named instance.