I ran into an interesting problem today when trying to call a stored procedure from a linked server ‘Server not configured for RPC’. SQL 2000 uses RPC (Remote Procedural Calls) which is basically XML representing Objects on the server. The linked in server must be configured to handle this and by default SQL 2000 servers are not. It’s very simple to setup though all you need do is run the following:

exec sp_serveroption @server='servername/IP', @optname='rpc', @optvalue='true'
exec sp_serveroption @server='servername/IP', @optname='rpc out', @optvalue='true'

or you can go into your enterprise manager or SQL studio, right click on the Linked server and select ‘Server Options’ and select ‘True’ for ‘RPC’ and ‘RPC Out’.