Fix Error 15123: The configuration option does not exist.

Yesterday, one of my teammate was facing an issue while enabling a server level parameter using T-SQL command sp_configure. He was trying to enable extended procedure xp_cmdshell using sp_configure command but he received error 15123. Full description of error is given below.

Msg 15123, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_configure, Line 51
The configuration option ‘xp_cmdshell’ does not exist, or it may be an advanced option.

The screenshot of the error is given in below image.

You might get this error while changing or viewing values of any advanced server configuration option. Here I will show you how to fix this error and make such changes successfully.

Error 15123 – Root Cause

As we know, there are lot of server level configurations that we can see or change using command sp_configure. Some of the server level configuration options categorized as advanced options and that cannot be viewed or changed if the value of “show advanced options” is set to 0 or disabled.

We can view “show advanced options” value by running sp_configure command. If the run value of this command is set to 0 it means this option is disabled and you cannot see any advanced server configurations.

To see or change the advance server level configurations we need to enable “show advanced options” by setting its value to 1 using sp_configure. Run below command to check the current run value for “show advanced options”. You can also simply type sp_configure command and execute it to get its details along with all other server configuration options.

exec sp_configure ‘show advanced options’

We can see run value of parameter “show advanced option” is set as zero it means we cannot view or change any advanced server configurations using command sp_configure.

This is the main reason behind getting error 15123 and we can get this error while changing any advance server level parameters. Read below section to enable “show advanced options” and change the values of advanced server configurations.

Solution

Generally, we get error 15123 because “show advanced options” is disabled and set to zero and it’s not allow to do anything with advanced server options. As we have seen “show advanced options” is set to zero in above screenshot. Here, we will enable it and then run again same command that we have ran in first screenshot to enable xp_cmdshell extended procedure.

Let’s enable “show advanced options” option to view or change the advance server level configurations by running below command.

exec sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 1
 RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

Above command has been executed successfully. You can see this in below screenshot.

Now we can go ahead and view any advanced options by running simply sp_configure command. If you need to make any changes on existing values of advanced server options then also you can do it using sp_configure command now. Let’s go ahead and run same command that we had ran in first image to enable xp_cmdshell.

exec sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 1
 reconfigure with override

We can see this command has been executed successfully this time without any error.

Whenever you get error 15123 while viewing or changing values of any advanced option you should first enable or set the value for option “show advanced options” then you can make your desired changes accordingly.

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