Jason Kleban's questions

I've got:

• an Azure Virtual Network,
• an Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller on that network,
• a Point-to-Site VPN set up for that network all the way so that I can connect to it from my local machine and ping VM ip addresses
• a registered DNS Server of the Domain Controller
• a registered DNS Server for the Virtual Network (overriding the Azure Name Resolution, I guess)

But I cannot resolve DNS names of VMs in the network from a VPN-connected client. Shouldn't this just work? What might be wrong?

The advanced settings of my network adapters don't show this connection as something I can reorder to prioritize DNS.

The client is Windows 8.1, by the way.

Thanks!

Visual Studio 2013 supports direct WebDeploy publishing (no intermediate package files to manually move). I have this working against an Azure "Website" because the server already supports WebDeploy and Azure's Portal/Dashboard lists the WebDeploy publish settings.

But now I'm trying to set up a full Windows Server VM (on Azure, but that shouldn't matter) and though I've fully installed WebDeploy (so it seems) I cannot find where to configure the WebDeploy Service.

There are similar questions on this site, but none match perfectly (and none with applicable answers) so please check carefully before suggesting a duplicate. This one sounds similar to me but the answers don't help me.

============

The option to "Configure Web Deploy Publishing" is not available in my Deploy context submenu in IIS as shown in this otherwise helpful article.

Using Microsoft Azure I have a default Active Directory domain (apparently) and I can create VMs. To my surprise, such VMs are not joined to the AD domain automatically and domain users can't log into it.

Is it possible to join these Azure VMs to the Azure Default AD? How or why not?

Thanks!

Is it possible to LOCALLY run the Windows Server 2012 "Virtual Machine Connection tool" on a Windows 2012 Server Core with minimal Management UI?

I want to run a minimalist 2012 Server Core with HyperV and load and switch among my "productivity" virtual guest OSes (some selection of Windows 8, an additional Windows Server 2012, Ubuntu, etc.) all on the same machine and simultaneously. Is it possible to (graphically) connect to those desktops without a full desktop shell running on the primary 2012?

Since all I really want out of the VMC tool is a display surface - or even exactly a full screen with just one reserved keyboard to return to the host, the UI requirements are very light for the Core to satisfy. (It would also be neat to be able to ctrl+alt+shift left and right to different loaded VMs)

(Please add a tag for windows-2012)

I'm inheriting a database that has 400 tables and only 150 foreign key constraints registered. Knowing what I do about the application and looking at the table columns, it's easy to say that there ought to be a lot more.

I'm afraid that the current application software will break if I started adding the missing FKs because the developers have probably come to rely on this "freedom", but step one in fixing the problem is to come up with the list of missing FKs so we can evaluate them as a team.

To make matters worse, the referencing columns don't share a naming convention.

The relationships ARE coded informally into the hundreds of ad-hoc queries and stored procedures, so my hope is to parse these files programmatically looking for JOINS between actual tables (but not table variables, etc).

Challenges I foresee in this approach are: newlines, optional aliases and table hints, alias resolution.

• Any better ideas? (Besides quitting)
• Are there any pre-built tools that can solve this?
• I don't think regex can handle this. Do you disagree?
• SQL Parsers? I tried using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser but all that is exposed is the lexer - can't get an AST out of it - all that stuff is internal.

I have a OCZ Vertex 2 SSD that I've been using for a few years in a Win2k8 64-bit "Server" (Dell Precision M4300). Every few weeks it gets in a mood during which it temporarily freezes very often for about 60 seconds. During the freeze, any application or thread that is not dependent or blocked on disk activity is still functional.

The drive firmware is up-to-date.

Here is a screen cap of my resource monitor during a freeze. There is no legend for the Resource Monitor or description in the help, but I gather that green is good, the blue line is bad.

I've already opened a ticket with OCZ (finally, now that they have a proper support system) and they're recommending it to be replaced. But I'd like to know whether there's some setting that I've got wrong that could be fixed without replacing the drive, or which if unaddressed, will cause the same problem on a replacement.

UPDATE:

The drive was kindly and without hassle replaced by OCZ for an Agility 3. I've restored the Windows 2008 system onto the new drive and to my surprise, the behavior persists! (Actually, it seems even more intense than with the first drive).

I'm having some luck uninstalling the ICH8M SATA Controller in the device manager - at least through one test, uninstalling it made the freezing cease, but it came back when I rebooted.

Disabling the AHCI mode in the BIOS seems to get rid of the problem altogether, but at what cost in performance or even data stability? TRIM?

I'm trying to get a list of files from a directory excluding files in hidden folders. With the following command, hidden folders are traversed even though I've set /A:-H to exclude hidden directories. Is there a different switch to stop them from being traversed too?

dir "C:\SVN" /A:-H /w /b /s

Alternatively, for this use case I know the name of the hidden folders I want to exclude, so if there is a way to exclude the folders by name ("\.svn\") that might have to suffice.

Thanks!

We have a DELL 3115cn in the office here and it drives us nuts that after the first page of EVERY job it "CALIBRATING..." before finishing the job.

Is there a setting or a firmware update to fix this? Dell support sucks.

Is there any effective way to certify a domain name, an email server, an email message, etc so that it will not be bounced as spam?

I've got a short, plain letter .com domain name registered through godaddy (with proxy-registration) that has never been previously owned and has never, to my knowledge, been exploited for sending spam while I've owned it (I have the only user account). But still, some emails - usually critical, initial emails to new customers - are getting dropped, sometimes with no bounce message and nothing in their spam folder.

My mail is hosted through Google Apps where any hosting issue I experience would be multiplied by the number of customers and hopefully addressed or at least known.

I've experienced similar email problems even on cox.net ISP email, but it's really beginning to get on my nerves!

Thanks,

Jason

In the backup config panels, Windows Server Backup warns that with backup to a network share, the previous backups are overwritten. What I haven't figured out is whether a failed backup results in NO backup, or if the failed backup is just dropped, leaving the previous backup in-tact. In this scenario, the previous backup would be erased only after a successful subsequent backup.

Thanks!

I'm installing a new instance of SQL 2005 on an existing cluster. From what I've read, I should be able to install that new instance on the same cluster name with a new instance name. Same IP, different port, same server name.

But instead, the setup is only allowing me to create a brand new sql virtual server name, new IP.

Is having two sql groups on the same cluster with the same virtual server name and IP, just different port and instance name possible?

Thanks.

Should SQL 2000 and 2005 maintenance plans be resilient to a database being detached or offlined?

I detached / offlined a few databases, and now the maintenance plans are failing in their entirity because SQL can't find/connect to the database. It seems to me a simple matter for SQL to either re-calculate the script upon such a change OR to have a wizard-generated maintenance plan that will (at worst) just emit a warning about the unavailable databases and continue with the independent parts of the script, such as the other databases.

As it is, it seems to me to be required that I go into each step-block of the "User DBs" maintenance plan, switch the setting to "All databases", ok out of the wizard, save, go back in and set it back to "All databases except the system databases", ok out of the wizard, and save. That's a lot of clicks! (That's 2005, with a similarly awkward list for 2000)

Is it normal? or is something else wrong?

Thanks!

I am planning for this scenario: SQL 2005 with an Active/Active configuration (that is, 2 nodes, 2 instances, each node holds active one of the instances, each node is the other's backup)

The SQL (master db), Data, Log, and Quorum partitions are on LUNs. I know that we require two SQL, two Data, and two Log partitions for this setup, and I'm pretty sure that we need two Quorum partitions as well, but my team isn't in agreement.

My thinking is that this "Active/Active" cluster configuration is really two logical clusters, squashed into two nodes, each node wearing two hats (Active & Passive). Each cluster needs its own Quorum so that its Active node can own it - one partition (or even one LUN) cannot be owned by multiple nodes simultaneously.

So, Active/Active requires one quorum partition for each node, just like the Sql, Data, and Log partitions, right?

Thanks,

Jason