Posted by Razvan Socol on 12/20/05 08:46

Hello, Crazy Cat

Considering that this behaviour was also in Enterprise Manager (for SQL
Server 2000), I'd say that it is "by design". And seeing that the
relevant procedures are only sp_addlinkedserver and
sp_droplinkedserver, I'd say that there isn't any workaround (except
the one that you mentioned: drop the linked server and recreate it).

However, it is interesting to notice that for certain OLEDB Providers,
some properties are not read-only in the General tab (for example, for
the "Microsoft Jet 4.0 OLE DB Provider", the "Product name", "Data
source" and "Provider String" can be modified). Management Studio (and
Enterprise Manager) accomplishes this by directly updating the
sysservers system table. However, I do not recommend trying to update
the system tables yourself. This is unsupported and if they didn't do
it in Management Studio, there are very good reasons why this should
not be done.

Razvan

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