Recently, I noticed errors occuring daily at 2:00AM on my SQL Cluster. The errors showed Windows logins being routed to the wrong named instances, along with errors from SQL Browser not being able to service client requests. I noticed that all of the instances being affected were SQL Server 2008, but never any of my …

If you find yourself on a really restrictive network but still want to connect to a remote VPN, consider this solution. It allows you to connect a Mac OS X OpenVPN client to an OpenVPN server using a static key. I figured it out using a combination of websites, including dd-wrt's OpenVPN wiki, OpenVPN's documentation, …

In all my years of web programming, I've never used an Oracle database... until now. I was recently tasked with converting an Access database form into a web application using ASP.NET. The twist is that the data in the Access form is linked to an Oracle database. It would be an understatement to say that Oracle is …

In an effort to protect DBAs and developers from themselves, Microsoft has introduced a new default setting in SQL Server Management Studio. This setting prevents you from saving almost any change to db tables and throws out the following error: Saving changes is not permitted. The changes that you have made require …

SharePoint Geoff has a SharePoint 2010 Deployment Microsoft Project file (MPP) available for download that lists nearly every step imaginable for deploying SharePoint 2010. From identifying team leaders to installing software to monitoring web performance, it's got a ton of things covered. It's not a tailored solution, …

Recently I've been migrating a lot of databases from stand-alone physical servers into a PolyServe environment. Since this obviously requires a downtime, we have to schedule the moves with limited amounts of time. To add to the issues at night, the NetApp filers are busy so copies are slower. In order to speed up the …

UPDATE: Omg, awesome! Use PowerShell's Reset-ComputerMachinePassword, then reboot. Hat tip: Don't Rejoin to Fix. Don't do what I did below. Just run Reset-ComputerMachinePassword in PowerShell and reboot. Recently, my workstation was suddenly unable to logon to my Windows 2008 domain. After entering my domain username …

If you need to temporarily add an IP address in SCO, you can use ifconfig ifconfig net0 inet 172.16.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 But really, that just creates an alias that will disappear once the server has been rebooted. In order to permanently change an IP address on a SCO OpenServer Release 5, I used SCO's menu …

Recently, SQL Server 2008 was uninstalled from a Windows 2008 Server machine due to some configuration issues with Reporting Services. Attempts to re-install SQL Server with the Reporting Services option would fail. I was tasked with the re-install and as always, I welcome this type of work because there is something …

One of the most important tasks a DBA should perform daily is verifying database backup jobs are successful. Using Database Mail to e-mail upon the failure of a job is something everyone should be doing. But in some cases, that is not enough. You can query the MSDB database in order to find out the last time a database …