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October 30 Moving tempdb to a different locationYou'll probably see a lot of documentation on how to and why move the tempdb database on a different drive. One of them is a TechNet paper on Working with the tempdb in SQL Server 2005. The tempdb database is a system database which is similar to a user database except that it doesn't persist when SQL Server shuts down. SQL Server is the one managing the tempdb database but DBAs need to plan how to deploy the tempdb to achieve optimum performance. Moving it to a different drive will take advantage of the parallel read-write capabilities of your disk subsystem.
To move the tempdb database to a different drive, you need to use the ALTER DATABASE command
use master
go Alter database tempdb modify file (name = tempdev, filename = 'E:\Sqldata\tempdb.mdf') go Alter database tempdb modify file (name = templog, filename = 'F:\Sqldata\templog.ldf') go Make sure that you move the tempdb to a different disk subsystem, not just a different partition. A complete step-by-step Microsoft Knowledge Base is available for other options in moving the tempdb database Cisco VPN Client on Windows Vista RC2 Build 5744One of the applications that I frequently use is the Cisco VPN client. This enables us to connect to our data centers to remotely administer servers from just about anywhere in the world. As far as my work is concerned, this application is a very important one.
I installed Windows Vista Ultimate RC2 over the weekend and the very first application tht I installed was th Cisco VPN client software (apart from MSN and Yahoo! messenger). I am using v4.8.01.0300 and started installing and to my surprise, the installation failed. The worst part of it is, I could not even uninstall the application for reasons only Microsoft knew. After much Google-ing and searching across forums, I chanced upon forum posts with people having the same problems as I have. One suggested that I use v4.8.01.0410, which installs on WIndows Vista RC1 with no glitch. This is also a beta version that Cisco came up with for the Vista platform. I managed to download the specified version but since I could not uninstall the previous vesion, I had no other choice but to re-install Windows Vista from scratch so I can just install this version of the Cisco VPN client. Finally, after installing the VPN client, I tested by connecting to our VPN, logged in to our servers and was successfully authenticated. Installing a few more softwares like Acrobat Reader, Windows Mobile Device Center (Windows Vista's version of ActiveSync) and my messenger clients. I still have to test the other applications that I personally use for my presentations for Microsoft like Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005. If they don't work fine, I don't have a choice but to run Windows XP as well on another partition and wait until every software I use is fullysupported in Windows Vista October 18 Ez AD ScriptomaticI needed to create a script to create users and assign them to OUs and groups in Active Directory. This is something that we needed to do on a regular basis that's why I wanted to do something to automate the task. I struggled on searching for the right book and webpage until I saw Ez AD Sciptomatic from Microsoft. ADSI Scriptomatic uses Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI), is the scripting technology used to manage Active Directory. The tool generates a customizeable script for administrators to use to create Active Directory objects (OUs, users, groups, computers, etc.) which can be incorporated in any script. In my case, I am integrating it in a script which reads an Excel spreadsheet containing the list of users and their information (firstname, lastname, login, email, etc.)
Here's a sample script that the Ez AD Scriptomatic generates. This one creates a user in Active Directory
All that you need to do is set values for the strContainer and the strName variables. strContainer will be the container on which this user will be created. Since AD is heirarchical, the name of the container should also be heirarchical. Let's say you want to create a user under the Finance OU, your strContainer value will be strContainer="ou=Finance". If the user will be created under the Managers OU under the Finance OU, the value for strContainer will be strContainer="ou=Managers, ou=Finance". The strName variable will contain he name you wat to assign to this user.
Another sample script in creating a user in AD is shown below:
This approach is straight forward as you can assign more properties to an object upon creation. MSDN has a documentation for ADSI Your database is being accusedWhen your database is corrupted or the database files are nowhere to be found, SQL Server 2000 normally marks it as suspect. In Enterprise Manager, you database will be marked Suspect when this happens. I tried simulating this in SQL Server 2005 by deleting the database files so it will be marked suspect in SQL Server management Studio. To my surprise, there was no SUSPECT tag in the database affected. It appears as a normal database so any DBA would not be aware of any problems that this database could have encountered. You will only know upon looking at the properties of the database. An error will be thrown:
I wonder why Microsoft removed this feature in Management Studio. This is a very helpful tool for DBAs to quickly identify what is wrong with the database. October 13 When the postman is not available, use pegionsI have been trying to wait for management decision as to approving my workaround for using mail alerts for SQL Server. A Microsoft KB article specifies that MAPI is not cluster-aware. If you are using SQL Server, you know that SQL Server supports sending alerts through email. Having read this article a few months back gave me no choice but to come up with a workaround. We have a clustered SQL Server with automated jobs running (backup, restore, log shipping, etc.). The email alerts we have configured back then do not work due to this limitation. So I started working on a script that will be inserted in my SQL Server jobs. The script is a step in the job which is called only if the previous job failed. Although it is a bit troublesome as you have to do it manually on all SQL Server jobs, it's guaranteed to work on clustered SQL Servers. Below is a script that I used to send email alerts using SMTP.
I included this script as a step in my job and defined it as an Operating System command job script (I will be reusing this script for a lot of databases in a clustered instance that's why I decided to use a .VBS file being called by the job and passing some parameters like the database name). Tested it on my clustered SQL Servers by assigning a job that was configured to fail and I get flooded by emails. Good thing I had my Outlook rules defined October 11 SQL Server 2005 Instances Registry EntriesI will be deploying a SQL Server 2005 on a production environment this time (after doing one for UAT environment a few weeks back). Part of the deployment process is modifying the registry to incorporate some keys and parameter values for the AllowInProcess registry key. This registry key is used to configure OLEDB providers for Distributed Queries in SQL Server. One of the options to configure this is to use the sp_serveroption system stored procedure. In our case, the application vendors did a more difficult approach - importing registry keys. The thing about registry keys is that the source and the destination should have similar structures for a registry key to be imported properly. What's worse is that the application vendors simply use SQL Server 2005 as a platform but their applications were still built using the concepts behind SQL Server 2000. In order for me to successfully import the registry key, I looked at how SQL Server 2005 creates them when you install it on a Windows server. In SQL Server 2000, an instance is defined in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server. In SQL Server 2005 (which is also the same if you have SQL Server 2000 installed as another instance with SQL Server 2005), an instance is defined in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\Instance Names. This is where you can identify the instance name and the data value corresponding to your specific instance. So for example, you installed SQL Server 2005 as the first named instance, testInstance, the data value for this will be MSSQL.1. For the second named instance, testInstance2, the data value for this will be MSSQL.2 and so on and so forth. So if you need to modify registry keys for SQL Server 2005, make sure you are modifying it for the correct instance by looking at this registry key group. October 10 ASP.NET 2.0 ProfilesThe Profile provider in ASP.NET stores and retrieves information about our site’s users. It helps keep track of information from those who visit your site - whether they are anonymous or authenticated users. By default, the Profile provider uses a SQL Server 2005 Express as a data source to store these information although you can always customize the Profile provider to use some data sources other than SQL Server. Right out-of-the-box, web developers can simply use the Profile provider without having to do a lot of coding. The only thing that you need to do is to provide a definition of the user profile in the web.config. Below is a sample web.config file which defines a Profile property named visitorAliasName with a default value of guest and which allows anonymous users to use it. And since we are allowing anonymous users to make use of our Profile provider, we added another element in the web.config file named anonymousIdentification and set it's enabled property value to true.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration> <appSettings/> < <system.web>
<compilation debug="false" strict="false" explicit="true" /> < < anonymousIdentification enabled="true"/><profile> <properties> <add name="visitorAliasName" defaultValue="guest" allowAnonymous="true" /> </properties> </profile> </ </configuration> Now that we have defined the Profile provider with one property, we can start using it in our ASP.NET 2.0 page. One thing about the Profile provider is that once it is defined in the web.config file, it provides the developers a type-safe onject which is available in the IntelliSense feature in Visual Studio 2005/Visual Web Developer Express. Let's start by adding a text box and a button to set the profile. Below is the code for an ASP.NET 2.0 page that uses the Profile provider:
<script runat="server">
Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load If Not Page.IsPostBack Then TextBox1.Text = Profile.visitorAliasName End If End Sub Protected Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Profile.visitorAliasName = TextBox1.Text End Sub </script>edwin
< <head runat="server"> <title>Untitled Page</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> Enter Alias: <br /> <br /> <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox><br /> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Save" /></div> </form> </body> </html> If you look at the codes, there is nothing in there that shows you where a database connection nor an implicit insert to a database is being made. During the first call to this page, ASP.NET 2.0 does all of the background processing for you - database and objects creation and record insertions. Of course, this will only work if you have a SQL Server 2005 Express instance running on the server that hosts your ASP.NET 2.0 application. The above sample creates a profile and displays the visitorAliasName property value in the textbox. When you change the value in the textbox, it assigns the new value to the visitorAliasName property October 04 Reading information from Excel using VBScriptThis is a continuation of the script I was writing to audit all of the machines/servers in my domain using WMI and VBScript. The next part of that is having an Excel spreadsheet that contains the list of all your computers/servers in the domain. I don't want to manually run the script I created on each machine. So, this is a continuation of the script I was creating. It uses VBScript to read from my Excel spreadsheet. Once I can read from the Excel spreasheet, I can then pass the values as parameters to my script that does the auditing. Here's my script on reading an Excel spreadsheet. This assumes that the script and the Excel file are in the same folder. My Excel spreadsheet has this format: IP Address MachineName
October 02 using WMI and VBScript to auditAuditing hardware and software for all machines in your domain can be time consuming. For small organizations, it may be a bit manageable provided that you already have a checklist of items that you need to look at for auditing purposes. CPU, disk, RAM, OS, service pack versions, etc. are just a few of those things you would like to take into account when doing auditing and inventory. For larger organizations, this could be a big challenge. Since I work for an organization that provides IT services for clients, we are required to maintain server information for auditing and inventory purposes. Imagine me doing this for almost 200+ Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers in multiple domains, not to mention Windows XP workstations. Being a lazy guy as I am, I wrote a script to simply automate this task. It uses VBScript and WMI to retrieve hardware, software and operating system information from computers in the domain. This requires administrative rights on the machine where this script is executed. It generates a text file (with filename servername_yyyymmdd_Audit.txt) which contains the information retrieved by the script. This is my list of information, you can always generate a lot more information by referring to the WMI SDK. Simply replace the value in the strComputer variable to the name/IP address of the computer you wish to audit 'Script to change a filename using timestamps if Len(strMonth)=1 then
'Variable Declarations '===============================================================================
'================================================================
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") 'Set the file location to collect the data ''==============================================================
'================================================================ For Each objItem in colItems '================================================================
objTextFile.Write "MOTHERBOARD" & VBCRLF '===============================================================
'================================================================ objTextFile.Write "MEMORY" & VBCRLF '=================================================================== objTextFile.Write " " & VBCRLF & VBCRLF & VBCRLF & VBCRLF & "PARTITIONS" & VBCRLF '=================================================================== objTextFile.Write " " & VBCRLF & VBCRLF & VBCRLF & VBCRLF & "NETWORK" & VBCRLF
Set colNicConfigs = objWMIService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration WHERE IPEnabled = True") For Each strIPAddress In objNicConfig.IPAddress For Each strIPSubnet In objNicConfig.IPSubnet Next Next Set colNicConfigs =NOTHING
objTextFile.Write VbCrLf 'Clean Up SET colIESettings=NOTHING
If you are dealing with an organization with more than 50 computers and servers, it would still be tiresome to manually execute this script on each machine/server. A better way to do it is to have an Excel spreadsheet that contains the machine names/IP addresses of all the computers in your domain. read through the list and generate the text files based on that list. In my next blog entry, I will start with reading an Excel spreadsheet using VBScript and continue on to incorporate this script. |
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