SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps
SQL Server
This year I resolve to…
Jan 11th
If you hadn’t guessed, today’s post is part of this months TSQL Tuesday. This is an interesting topic for me since as a matter of principle I usually refuse to make resolutions and the like around the start of the new year. I like to set goals, and work towards those goals but, I think “resolving” to do something has this nagging way of never turning out how I’d like. It probably has something to do with the fact that I track goals but, typically only think about resolutions at a point in time.
So, this year Ill resolve to document a few of my goals for the year.
This year I only have a few professional goals. Actually, quite a few less than usual. I decided to trim down my professional goals this year to only a couple since they are quite large and very open ended.
- Id like to make PASS as responsive as possible to the needs of our SQL Community. This is simply to say that I plan to do what I feel I was elected to do. Of all the directors I am as well positioned as anyone to make real change that can be seen to the average user of SQL Server. I will need lots of help to make this happen, and I have no problem asking for that help (watch this space SOON for details)
- I want to learn to be a better “manager/leader” It takes a different set of skills to lead people than it does to be a DBA and do technical work. I love the technical work, actually more than the management stuff but, my current roles are requiring more leadership and less technical. I need to do better with the details of this and learn to inspire greatness in my teammates.
That’s it, 2 whole goals for the year, not much by count but, by effort I’d say these might be the some of the loftiest goals I’ve set in a long time…
Something old is something new
Jan 4th
For the new year I have decided to try something different with a series of small regular posts.
Dealing with our large team of developers and our DBA team as well, I often run across interesting discussions about small things that are easily overlooked. Often times these discussions end in a exclamation of “I knew that!!” Of course what really happend is the memory of that specific feature or tidbit has simply been paged out of our memory. I intend to take these (typicaly) small tidbits of SQL goodness and publish them to hopefully jog your memory as well.
It never hurts to have your memory paged back in occasionally and I hope this helps
Im a Winner!
Dec 20th
And no, I dont mean in my mothers eyes, thats a given.
I won the Ipad/SQL Monitor Contest that Redgate was sponsoring over on Grant Fritcheys Blog
Im thrilled to have won!! Ive been eyeing Ipads for quite some time but, the novelty & cost has kept me at arms length.
Im always in the market for DBA tools that can make my teams (or my) job easier, thats where redgate’s Sql Monitor comes in, shortly I expect to be running it through the paces. We already use most of the other redgate tools and love them so I have high expectations for SQLMonitor!
Christmas definetly came early for me this year, Its like Grant, Steve, Brent and most importantly Redgate were my very own elves!
Thanks again to Regdate for their outstanding support of our SQL Community.
PS: I expect to have some aweome pics of remote monitoring SQL Servers shortly!
SQL Server 2008 & IPV6 vs Symantec
Sep 27th
Had a strange error on a SQL 2008 cluster the other day,
The OS was Windows 2008 R2
We kept getting messages that the cluster node was offline because the Quorum was unavailable. This made little sense as both nodes in this cluster were online and the Quorum disk was available. We could ping across the heartbeat, everything looked fine except for these errors.
After a little research we determined that a new version of Symantec Endpoint Security had been pushed to these servers. Even with the new version of endpoint security, we could establish communication across all networks between the 2 nodes so we were a little stumped. Eventually we ran across a policy that was being enforced from the Symantec central management server/policy/whatever its called!
As it turns out, Symantec endpoint security by default blocks all IPV6 traffic. If you’re like me, I didn’t even realize that a windows 2008 cluster would use IPV6 for the heartbeat communication. After disabling the rules that were preventing IPV6 traffic everything returned to normal.
So, the moral of all this is nothing new… NEVER trust anything new getting pushed to your servers..
Shadows Rock, Filtering Platform not so much!
Aug 16th
RDP remote control (shadowing) of multiple sessions is a great way to allow geographically separated teams to work on the same Server console. You can do this from task manager
Control your co-workers!
Today I had a new install of windows 2008 that was rejecting the attempts at remote control, the error was ”remote control failed”, nothing was logged in the System or Application event logs. In the Security event log was only one error: “The Windows Filtering Platform has blocked a bind to a local port”
After plenty of fiddling and making sure there was no ”firewall” or reason for the filtering platform to be enabled, I came across this command I never knew existed “shadow”
Apparently whatever had the filtering platform angry and blocking access was ok with that simple command. So in this case going to a command window and running “shadow 3” worked perfectly, I could once again see both terminals and the windows filtering platform allowed me to actually work, instead of impeding me at every turn.
The Windows Filtering Platform on Server 2008 and 2008 R2 has been the culprit more times than I can count lately when the “gremlins” are inhabiting our servers, If only there were a way you could turn it off totally, but I guess that’s sort of like Internet Explorer, it cant be unbundled from the OS.
