Rolling SQL Server Error Logs WITHOUT Rebooting

This is a bit in reverse as the code will be above the rant today.

To roll SQL Server Error Logs, in 2000 and higher, a reboot isn’t necessary. 

Simply open up the Management Console (or Query Analyzer) and attach to the Master database.  From there, execute the built-in stored procedure ‘sp_cycle_errorlog’.

exec sp_cycle_errorlog
GO

This will roll your current ERRORLOG file along, according to the configuration settings you’ve specified.  The current log will be renamed ERRORLOG.#.

<rant>

We had a… discussion… earlier today between the department I work in and another regarding the virtues of uptime and keeping servers available. 

The paradigm is to reboot a server when something happens—no matter what.  Troubleshoot? Nah.  Diagnose?  No way.  Just kick it and pray it works.  Why?  Because that’s how Windows works.

Now, I agree with that 100%.  That is how Windows works.  I do that at home.  If my home computer starts being stupid, I’ll reboot it as a first step and go from there.

But, my home computer isn’t in a production environment with thousands of users (that I’m aware of).

There’s a big different there.

</rant>

 

Tags: SQL+Server, sp_cycle_errorlog, uptime

Backwards TDD Command in VS2008?

From ScottGu’s list of links today, I read through John W. Powell’s “10 Tips to Boost Your Productivity with C# and Visual Studio 2008.” 

There are a few goodies in there that I’d never seen/heard of, but one just makes me twitch a bit and seems TOTALLY backwards (and I’ve never noticed the feature before now).

There’s a context menu item while in code-behind or classes called “Create Unit Tests…” that will prefab a unit test of the current class. 

Oh really? 

I really do appreciate Microsoft’s continued efforts to work towards TDD and agile techniques—but doesn’t this seem backwards?  DDT?  Development Driven Tests? 

On the other hand, having a way to generate tests at all is pretty nifty, but what about those who may not understand how they’re generated or what the tests are actually doing?  Simply having “tests” isn’t the solution, but having a concrete understanding of what’s being tested and the expected outcomes.

I’d be far more impressed to click on my test while it’s in red and see a scaffold of implementation magically appear (which, can basically be done using ReSharper).

 

Tags: TDD, Visual+Studio+2008

IE 8.0 - First Impressions and Rendering

Unfortunately, I’m at home nursing the flu rather than living it up in Vegas at MIX08 so I’ve had to experience the fun vicariously through the thousands of blog posts, twitters, and videos of nearly every second of the event.

A big kick off revolved around the first Beta release of Internet Explorer 8.  Being adventuerous and well, not having anything else to do, I downloaded the x64 Vista version and have been hitting various web sites that I frequent to see how things look.

The IE Interface

Overall, IE 8 currently looks a LOT like IE7.  In fact, it takes a bit of hunting to find any differences what-so-ever.

The new “Favorites Bar” (or was that old) seems to be built to hold the new WebSlices, which I haven’t quite grasped yet (I don’t use eBay, sorry).

The Phishing Filter has been renamed the “Safety Filter”, which was immediately turned off.  I’m assuming Phishing was too difficult to explain (which is OK).  The concept is cool, I’m just not sure I want Microsoft being the “safe site” police.

Beyond that, I haven’t seen any other “changes”.  Let’s hope the real excitement is in the rendering.

Rendering

The tout of IE8 is it’s successful passing of Acid2, a standards-based rendering assessment.  Sadly, this is just in time for Acid3, which it not only doesn’t pass (nothing passes right now), but it does worse than most other “current” browsers only scoring a 17/100.

So, what about real sites?

Here are a few of the more common sites I visit and the results:

iGoogle – Renders OK, albeit VERY slowly.  Accuweather.com and del.icio.us web parts require mousing over the empty boxes to display their contents.  There is also a bunch of odd spacing at the top of the Gmail web part.

Gmail – Renders OK, very fast.  I couldn’t find any issue with Gmail at all.

Microsoft Exchange 2003 OWA – Works great, very fast. 

Microsoft SharePoint 2003 (SPS) – Works very well.  Renders extremely fast from page to page.  Mouse overs, context menus, etc. seem to work even better than in IE7.  Hah.

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) – Works.  Still requires “accepting” the “Name ActiveX Control”, which is REALLY annoying, but the site renders just fine.  Also renders a bit slow, but that’s just MOSS2007.

Weather.com – Works. A few positioning snafus, but everything is functional.  See image below.

Linkshell Fourms (built on VBulletin 3.6. – Works great.  The PHP-based forums work like a champ for my FFXI linkshell.  Thankfully!

Virtual Server 2005 R2’s Control Panel – Does not work.  Unfortunately, none of the menus work.  You cannot create/update/add anything or view the status of a running VM.  I can bounce back to IE7 emulation mode and it works OK.

MSDN Subscriber Downloads – Sorta works.  I’m assuming the new version of this site will resolve these issues.  So far, the site “works”, but renders a bit funny when you move the frame bars around.

FFXI Auction House – Does not work.  The side navigation bar is covered up and inaccessible.  Without that, it’s almost impossible to browse through the site (searching for EVERYTHING gets a bit tedious). See image to the right.

Twitter.com – Sorta sometimes works.  The functionality of the site is there, but the background and themes to the site are a bit haywire.  And updates aren’t being processed without a logout/login.  Ehh, odd.

WordPress – Does not work.  For some reason, the wp-admin console simply blanks the page out.  There’s a brief flash of it rendering, and then poof, just white.  I can View Source and see the code, refresh and see the flash, but haven’t been able to fix this one without dropping back to IE7 mode.

My Blog (Freshy Theme) – Sorta works. Well, this blog doesn’t render right either.  The Search bar at the top right of the screen is covered up and missing the [Search] button.  The right-hand bar no longer trails to the end of the page, but stops at the end of the content (assuming the height:100% failure), The main body footer is now the footer to the right-hand bar.  There are a few other z-index issues here and there, but those can be fixed (I’m assuming).

My Photo Site – Does not work.  Hmm, sucks.  Unfortunately, the menus doesn’t work.  Well, let me reword that, they work, but if you try to move from the Parent Menu to a Child Menu item, the menu disappears.  I’m assuming it’s a spacing issue for the mouse overs, but I’m not sure.  Ugh.

Random sites – I noticed most sites that I authenticated to, the hash out for the password turned up as an invalid character.  See below.

Things I Wish It Had

NoScript.  I really like FireFox’s NoScript plug in—especially with all the shakeup and paranoia regarding compromised accounts in FFXI.  I wish IE had something similar built directly into the browser.

Built-in support for social bookmarking.  Does anyone use Favorites or Bookmarks anymore?  I totally rely on del.icio.us and would LOVE to see better support for that in IE8.  I don’t want an annoying button that was put out by Yahoo, I want to open an Explorer Panel (like my Favorites) and see the heirarchy of my tags.

Conclusions

Well, for Beta 1, it’s not half bad.  It starts up instantly, looks clean, and appears to integrate into Windows Vista just fine.  If a few of the odd rendering snafus can be addressed (either by releasing WHY it doesn’t work or tweaks to the rendering engine in IE), I look forward to the next release.

Tags: IE8, Internet+Explorer+8, First+Impressions

WebGallery 2.0 #5 - CSS Friendly and W3C Compliant

In the fifth, and final, segment on the WebGallery 2.0 project, I wanted to touch on the CSS Friendly Adapters and work that went into creating a fully W3C compliant project.

In previous posts, we’ve discussed:

#1 - Introduction
#2 - HttpHandler and LINQ Data Model
#3 - Building the Galleries
#4 – Adding Admin Tools

NOTE: Code downloads are available on the Introduction post.

MOSS 2007 and Wishing I Was “In the Know”

A rant in the joys of communication and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 configuration.

It was determined that SSP (Shared Services Providers) would run internally on 8081.  We were told nothing ran on that port in our enterprise.  After FAR too much time (not going to say for sake of my ego) fiddling with why I couldn’t get the SSP services to work in MOSS 2007.

We were lied to like the step-children we are…

After finally just hitting the root of the URL (/ssp/admin/ is the default shortcut), I discovered one of our enterprise “monitoring” softwares had a web service running on that port… which means it’s running on that port on every server and desktop in our enterprise.  wtf.  Oh, and the people who were “in the know”… knew, but didn’t feel it was important or whatever to tell us.

So, now the joys of ripping the SSP out of MOSS and reconfigure it on a different port (and praying THAT one isn’t taken).

*grumbles*

On a side note, I’ll have a new article posted up pretty soon.  The article goes into a bit of detail on setting on a small server farm with MOSS—everything from initial installation to setting up Active Directory profiles, search services, indexing, and updating to the latest Service Pack 1.  After the past week of dinking with this, I now see why Bill English’s MOSS 2007 Administrator’s Guide is 1155 pages and heavy enough to beat someone with.  Good book, by the way—just a bit difficult to follow as there’s no “order” to it.

[UPDATE: While out scraping ice off my car, I had an idea to help myself be more “in the know”.  I use TCPView quite often to see what processes are going where—well, TCPView shows the ports! Just do a bit of monitoring, see where different services are, and go for it.  The fancy alternative, of course, could be to setup Ethereal, set a filter for “tcp.port == {your port here}” and let it run for a day or so.]

Tags: MOSS+2007, TCP+Ports, Communication, SSP

A word of warning… your domain is your life!

Thankfully, our domain names and registrations don’t fall under my “responsibilities,” so I’m still employed.  Others may not be so lucky by the end of the day.

I noticed early this morning—I couldn’t access OWA (Outlook Web Access).  After 10–15 minutes of 404 errors, I gave up and came into work.  When I got into the office, it appeared that all external services were down.  Our public web presence, Lyris server, all external applications facing our customers, VPN services, the works.

After three hours of watching people running around like headless chickens, the truth came out.

No one paid our domain renewal bill—our domain expired. 

I’m assuming that the problem is fixed by now and replication is taking it’s course—but the flood of customer complaints, city advocates calling wondering what’s going on and why we’re “for sale,” and the entire enterprise wondering why external email isn’t working is keeping our Customer Service department hopping.

So, a word of warning—when your registrar sends you the 30 day notice, don’t DELETE it. It’s important and your job SHOULD count on it.

Ahh, Happy Monday.

Tags: domain+registration, workplace

Opera Web Browser == Pornography?

For part of the current “AJAXing” series, I had to reinstall Opera on my machine.  I’m pretty used to the Evil Stop Sign of Despair, but this really got me laughing… 

You cannot access the following Web address: http://www.augemedia.de/opera/win/925/en/Opera_9.25_Eng_Setup.exe This site is blocked under the {company} filtering policy. If you believe this site has been blocked inappropriately, send a request for a site review to {email someone who cares}. In order for your request to be processed you must include the address of the site you would like reviewed, your name, and the educational application of the site in question. Please contact Customer Service at {number} if you have additional questions.   The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Pornography

Now, our filter is supposed to evaluate files AND domains, so it should work.  In addition, come on, it’s Opera—they wouldn’t be hosting on porn sites.

Right??

Ehh.

So, Augemedia, who claims to be “Defying standards since 1989” and is the primary host for US downloads appears to be based out Germany; cool enough.

They have several projects going on…

• Warring Factions – a MMO strategy game.  No problems there.
• Bay Dream Templates – Template design for online auctions.  Neat.

And then the one that MAY just be why the filter caught it.

• Kiss Chance – Adult Dating and Swinger Site.

:D  HA!  Yeah, that probably doesn’t make it through K-12 filtering, but what’s odd is that the “project” isn’t even hosted on the www.augemedia.de domain, but on it’s own domain.  What’s even more ironic is that going directly to that domain DOES get through the filter.  ROFL.

So, I tried three more downloads—and all three were blocked for pornography (I didn’t take the time to “look” at the sites).  I finally found downloaded it directly from the Opera Software link and it worked like a champ.

So, a note to the filtering experts out there—maybe a bit of due dilligence on where “bad” content is and where it REALLY is would be in order?

To Opera—what kind of “special payments” are you getting for hosting anyway?  Hah.

 

Tags: Internet+Filtering, Opera+Web+Browser

Big Brother is Watching Me Surf

I was mid-read of Matt Berseth’s blog this morning and was greeted with our filter’s cheerful message:

You cannot access the following Web address:

http://www.mattberseth.com/

This site is blocked under the filtering policy. If you believe this site has been blocked inappropriately, send a request for a site review to {email removed}. In order for your request to be processed you must include the address of the site you would like reviewed, your name, and the educational application of the site in question. Please contact your site STS or Customer Service at {phone removed} if you have additional questions.

The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Malicious Sites

So, I contacted with a serious WTF question.  Lately, more and more blogs, forums, and community sites—which are key resources to modern developers—have been blocked. 

The answer I got: Send in a formal request, it will be reviewed by the curriculum department to ensure it’s safe for children.  If it’s not, then it will remain blocked.  Coding sites are considered malicious because they teach potential hacking skills to children that could endanger the stability of network systems.

w.t.f.

I haven’t even responded yet.  I don’t have anything nice to say that will keep me employed.  And, for now, I don’t have to worry… because THIS blog (my blog) is blocked too… tomorrow, maybe Google will be blocked because we don’t want children to find anything “bad”.

Thankfully, I can still RDP into my home computer and WORK.

Note: I’m not saying Internet filtering and such are bad; but due dilligence of staff/parents/etc. should make up for some of that—and educating children what they should and shouldn’t access will make it less taboo.  Oh, and separate filtering policies for the MIS Department and the kindergarteners, kthx.

[Update 12:45pm: I now have an ‘understanding’ of the full process.  An email to a monitored address, a response, a form to fill out, a few committee or individual, a response with further questions, an email back, and finally it’s opened up.  I’m tempted for two things: a) just continue RDPing out because that process took almost 1.5 hours, b) send in 100+ of them at one time.  And yes, my blog is still blocked—RDPing home to post.]

Tags: internet+filtering, education, blocking, obstruction, technical+sites, blogs

Technology is a tool for education, not a replacement

<rant>

It’s a constant battle to fend off those who want to use technology as either a replacement or implementer of policy.  Technology is awesome—and those of us who are programmers are at a point in time when we can do almost anything we can imagine to empower people; however, many forget the EMPOWER part.

Technology is a tool used to augment a human’s value.  In the classroom, technology allows teachers to better instruct students, better assess their progress and redirect where necessary, and better communicate with parents—but it is not a replacement for a competent, well-educated teacher.  If we want computers teaching our kids, why would we need teachers?  Because they add value—they can apply human emotions, understanding, and life experiences to educating our youth.

Unfortunately, many try to use technology to ‘fix’ everything—assess the students a few more times, rework the results until the results demonstrate what we want, and then repeat.  If something isn’t right, the common answer, lately it seems, is to use technology to fix it, not the teacher.  Teachers are left out of the picture (and many seem to want it that way—it’s less work) and place the students in front of a computer for assessment.  The computer then prescribes (ala prescriptive teaching) what the student should learn and everyone goes about their business.  A teacher who steps up and “prescribes” something different with a gut feeling or understanding of the student, they are simply told that they are wrong.

If a teacher cannot teach, but is simply a facilitator of prescribed curriculum, then what value do they add and why should parents send their children to school when they could receive the same education (sub the social effects) using the new “online” schools?

The only real reason I have continued my education is for the educators—the teachers that I’ve met over the years.  I honestly can’t say that I’ve been affected by a book I’ve read or a lesson taught out of a manual, but I can attest that the personalities, the humor, the life experiences of some of my teachers and their passion for teaching will forever live with me. 

To me, to go through nearly 20 years of school with a drone reading a lesson plan and not providing any human value, would be a horrid, horrid experience.  I pity today’s children who are locked in this psychological box.

</rant>

Tags: education, technology, prescriptive+teaching

Fighting Our Virtualization Standards

With the soon-to-be-released SAN we’re having installed (woo.. shiny, clustered SQL, web, and other boxes that I get to sit and play with—I’m still a hardware junkie at heart), our platform of choice was VMWare for their enterprise solutions.  That has, however, led to an argument on standardization here in our enterprise.

Right now, the developers (read: me) are using Virtual Server 2007 R2 and/or Virtual PC 2007.  After failed attempts at really pushing the Altiris SVS solutions, we’re using differencing disks and have a beautiful (and working) process for instanciating environments in a few mouse clicks. 

Why did we I choose Microsoft’s product?  Because the images I get from Microsoft are in VPC format and I didn’t want to nor do I have the time to constantly convert or recreate them.  It seemed logical.  Also, VPC was free.  That helps; I’m cheap.

However, with this rollout, I found out that VMWare now has VMWare Server (v1.0.3) that is a free virtualization product.  So, this article was born—comparing what I’m comfortable with in VPC2007 to my experience creating and provisioning a new box using VMWare Server.  I didn’t do any comparisons to the Server management tools, so this doesn’t have a comparison to Virtual Server 2007 and VMWare ESX.

VPC 2007 – Current Issues or Concerns

So far, Microsoft products have been flawless and worked beautifully in our environment.  They support x86 and x64 platforms, are freely available, and, for the most part, foolproof.

• Lack of high resolution graphic support – I don’t mean gaming, I mean 1920×1440 graphics, full screen on my large monitors.
• Lack of USB support – I cannot connect a jump drive to the host and easily access it in the VM (I have to share the folders).
• Video “flicker” in DirectX games – For some reason, various DirectX games, like FFXI, have a 1–2 second flicker after isntalling VPC 2007, rendering these games unplayable.  For this, I can’t install VPC on my desktop at home… and can’t play those games on my laptop that I use for development.  Not a huge issue, just annoying.

That’s about it; VPC has been very kind to me over the years.  I have many virtual machines that I use as base disks and, so far, the process works—so why change it for a bit of frivilious functionality?

VMWare Server – The Good!

Multiple CPU support

The first feature that caught my attention is that I can assign a number of CPUs to each virtual machine.  It isn’t as detailed as Virtual Server that I can assign a percentage of EACH CPU, but I at least can control whether or not it uses 1 or 2 CPUs (these are physical CPUs, not dual core).  That’s pretty neat.

Security – assign LDAP account to virtual machine

Each virtual machine can run as a specified LDAP (or local account) providing special access as needed.  That’s a neat security feature, though I’m not sure when I’d use it… since I’m just me and I tend to not try to lock myself out of my own stuff. 

USB Controller

VMWare natively supports USB.  Add the controller to the image and activate it—your USB devices connect.  VERY cool.  I did learn though—don’t add the USB device that the virtual machine is located on… it disconnects the device from the host (briefly) before loading it.  Whoops.

High resolution graphic support

VMWare supports up to 2360×1770 (odd resolution??) in the control panel… and does widescreen very nicely.

VMWare Server – The Bad!

Cannot full screen high resolution

The high resolution support is nice, but does not support full-screen at 1920×1200 (Dell 24” widescreen at work); it can only go to 1920×1440.  Now, I can maximize the window to somewhat avoid this, but I’m not real smart and the two Start buttons gets confusing.

VPC 2007 Imports Fail

VMWare supports importing Virtual PC/Server files (.vmc); however, fails that the files cannot be read.  Quite unfortunate.  This is a HUGE failing point for me since I don’t really want to rebuild the images I get from Microsoft (or that we have pre-built).

VMWare configuration changes modify the host

VMWare uses intercepting drivers (USB, hard drive, network, etc) to attach to the host.  I’m sure VPC does this too, but not as intrusively.  Every time you change your configuration to the virtual environment, it changes a driver on the host.  Network resets actually bounce your host’s network connection.  Not a huge issue, but really annoying.

No differencing disks!

*cry*  VMWare has “snapshots” that are basically a point in time that allows persistent or non-persistent changes; however, VMWare Server doesn’t support snapshot trees… so… yeah, I don’t see value in that and see the migration requiring a total redesign of our process (processes that are efficient and effective). Ugh.

Conclusion

For now, with the need to work with Microsoft and my crave for differencing disks, I see myself remaining with VPC 2007, but the VMWare solution seems viable and stable and the ESX side looks sweet—I’m sure it’ll do a great job running our SAN.  Now I just have to duck and cover when the networking guys come around.

Tags: vmware+server, virtual+pc+2007, virtualization