Mark's questions

Every day I notice several of my project DBs on SQL 2008 R2 (v. 10.50.2500) get into a limbo state where they are unavailable. They're not technically offline in this case. In Management Studio, there's no plus sign next to them to expand them, and when I right click > Properties I just get a single "General" pane with all data grayed out, with many properties just saying Unavailable.

We've found that we can correct this by going to Tasks > Take Offline then going back to Tasks > Bring Online

What could be causing this issue? Incorrect settings at the SQL server level?

Our SQL DB server runs on Windows Server 2008 R2 and the drives storing the DBs are on a SAN.

We've recently re-created a public calendar on our Exchange Server 2003 after our previous instance of exchange crashed. We call the calendar DevTeam since its for our development team to post public team-focused meetings. We used to have an email alias for this calendar, something like [email protected]. We were able to use this alias to create a personal meeting in our own calendar and when inviting [email protected] (in the To field) it would automatically go into the DevTeam public calendar. How can I setup this email alias for this calendar if the calendar already exists?

Also, this is very similar to having a "resource calendar" that auto-accepts invites, but this is not a resource, its just a public calendar.

Thanks in advance!

I have some tasks in the Task Scheduler on Windows 2008 R2. I created them as the admin and I'm logged in as the admin. I have no easy way to rename the tasks. The only way I can is to export the task config to a XML file and re-import to a new task, change the name there, then delete the old task. Is there an easier way?

What's the difference between using Akamai NetStorage vs. Akamai's Edge Service? Below are the concepts that I believe differentiate them but I'd like more details from more experienced people.

NetStorage

This is literally a high performance hosting place for things like images, JS, CSS, XML, videos, other static assets, etc. You literlally FTP files to a specific location and retreive them from a specific Akamai URL. These assets are all really fast since they're cached and globally distributed.

Edge service

This is not a hosting option but rather a caching option for existing hosting. So you tell it what to cache (file types, paths, etc.) and for how long. It goes to those items hosted on your origin server and caches them globally to its servers, then you have your live site point to Akamai's edge to "host" them to the public.

1. Are my assumptions above correct?
2. Why would you use one vs. the other?
3. What would be the benefit to ever use NetStorage over the edge service?
4. What are the cost comparisons? Are they about equal? Is NetStorage about x many times more expensive than edge?
5. Are there any other contrasting features that I should be aware of?

We've installed Oracle Express on a Windows 2003 Server and in the process it updated the PATH. We're trying to get IIS to see this change in the PATH but we can't figure it out. We've recycled the app pool and the IIS site with no success. Is there any way to get it to recognize without restarting IIS itself? It's a prod server so we don't want to reset IIS.

We've noticed a lot of .trc files in our SQL data folder (\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data) on our server. The date range for these files spans over one day and the total file size of all files together is about 21 gigs. I'd like to free up this space but I'm not sure if I can just delete the files manually through Windows Explorer or if I need to do anything in SQL, like run a command or script. Any ideas?

I have a site running on IIS6 and I want to make it authenticate via the standard gray pop-up window. I.e. it should use Windows to authenticate. I want to make it so only one single user on the system can get in, not any user setup on the server. Its currently setup without anonymous access and with Integrated Windows Auth. Any user on the system can use their credentials to log in. How do I make it so only a single user can get it?

I have a simple batch script that recursively looks at all files and folders within the directory and writes out the file inventory to a text file. It currently looks like this:

dir /b/s > files.txt

The /b means don't give any extra info and /s makes it recursive within sub-folders. The sample output is:

C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes\Sitev2
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes\Sitev2\images
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes\Sitev2\style
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes\Sitev2\images\site
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes\Sitev2\images\site\beta.gif
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes\Sitev2\style\site.css
C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\Web\Themes\Sitev2\style\ie7.css

I'd like two things:

1. Only list out files in this listing rather than files and folders
2. I'd like the paths to be relative from where the batch script was called

E.g. I have the script in the C:\Users\mark\Desktop\site\site\ folder so I don't want to see up to that point.

Is it possible to do those two things and if so, can anyone help with either?

I'm logged on as the Administrator and want to set a specific wallpaper image for all users. I've done it before on 2003 Server but forget where. I think it was somewhere inside the Local Security Policy manager but I can't find it. Does anyone know where to enable the active desktop then set the wallpaper?

I have SQL Server disabled on my machine and have to manually go into services (services.msc) to enable it and the agent. I'd like to write a batch script that I can run to enable them for me. Is it possible? When I do net start in the command prompt I don't see it listed so I'm not sure if it's possible.

EDIT: I'm using Windows Vista. I keep it disabled because having it run all the time slows my comp down and not all my web dev requires it. I'm more productive with it off most of the time because it is so resource intensive, especially for boot time.

On Windows Server 2003, I have a task that is scheduled to run every morning at 12 am. The time it takes to run varies since it is a search engine spider that crawls a website. I want to have a batch script run when the task ends. Is there a way to do that using Task Scheduler or no?