If you ever get locked out of your PVS Console because someone in your organization changed Active Directory membership groups around, you will need to find out what security groups have permission to access the farm. It’d be super-easy if you could just open your Console…Security tab under Farm Properties. But what if you lost access?

…Fortunately there is a way because it’s all in the database. All you need to do is login to your SQL server, launch SQL Management Studio, expand the PVS database, right-click on the dbo.AuthGroup table, select top 1000 rows, and you will see a list of all the AD user groups that have permissions to access the farm. Then you will most likely realize that your Console user is NOT a member of any of those groups!