Cade Roux's questions

Related to this question: How can a Perfmon "% Processor Time" counter be over 100%?

I was manually observing processes in Task Manager when a user reported a problem and the Oracle process was using 80%-95% for a sustained period of time (5-15 minutes).

So I've been using perfmon for the last couple days to track that process and noticed it going OVER 100% for short periods, so it's apparently in perfmon it's the total over all the processors.

My question is that the 80-95% I was seeing in Task manager would really have been corresponding to 160-180% in perfmon, right?

(obviously factoring in that some processes may not be able to use all processors efficiently).

Task Manager was showing 80-95% CPU here:

Perf Monitor can spike above 100% on the line for a single process object:

I'm running a server on AWS and I'm connecting out to a partner's FTP site (not much idea what they are running). My server has an elastic IP. In the results below xx.xx.xx.xx is the internal IP (same as I get from IPConfig). yy.yy.yy.yy is the external IP (same as I am RDPed into).

Connected to ftp.site.com.
220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] ----------
220-You are user number 1 of 50 allowed.
220-Local time is now 22:47. Server port: 21.
220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server.
220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity.
User (ftp.site.com:(none)): someuser
331 User someuser OK. Password required
Password:
230 OK. Current restricted directory is /
ftp> literal pasv
227 Entering Passive Mode (69,28,68,87,255,170)
ftp> ls
500 I won't open a connection to xx.xx.xx.xx (only to yy.yy.yy.yy)

I tried PASV mode, but it's not working.

I have nothing open on my security group except the RDP.

Windows Firewall is running on the server as well with what looks like Amazon's default configuration.

Once I get this connection working I will probably be FTPing data from an SSIS package to their server, FWIW.

I know FTP is quirky through NAT like this with the connections being opened coming back. What do I need to do?

Related to this question:

Windows Server in UTC, need Task Scheduler to shift tasks with summer time

and this question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11458029/enabling-disabling-tasks-in-task-scheduler-using-a-powershell-script

Is there a way to selectively enable and disable certain triggers (not the whole task) with powershell?

I have two "Daily" triggers on my task on my UTC server, one scheduled to run an hour after the other. I only want one to be enabled, and I want to toggle between them twice a year.

The Task Scheduler doesn't appear to have a unique "name" for the triggers, they just appear as "Daily"

I'm perfectly happy to have my server in UTC, but when a user needs something scheduled to happen in a particular time in a particular time zone, they are expecting that to obey their time zone rules as they change time zones throughout the year (I'm not trying to accommodate geographic movement).

Is there a way to easily accommodate this without changing the server to switch time zones twice a year or do you have to have two tasks set up for the different time zones as the users' perception changes from EDT to EST?

It seems like this would be a useful feature since on non-UTC servers, they offer the reverse option to specify a time in UTC for the task to be able to synchronize tasks on different servers.

I installed optware and I have curl available. I'm trying to get it to notify me (through pushover) when the router is rebooted.

curl \
-F "token=<token goes here>" \
-F "user=<user key goes here>" \
-F "message=ASUS Router WAN Up" \
https://api.pushover.net/1/messages

This is an Asus RT-N16 router using Tomato Firmware 1.28.0000 MIPSR2-097 K26 USB Mega-VPN

The error message indicates that it is an issue with the CA installed:

url: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed
More details here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html

curl performs SSL certificate verification by default, using a "bundle"
 of Certificate Authority (CA) public keys (CA certs). If the default
 bundle file isn't adequate, you can specify an alternate file
 using the --cacert option.
If this HTTPS server uses a certificate signed by a CA represented in
 the bundle, the certificate verification probably failed due to a
 problem with the certificate (it might be expired, or the name might
 not match the domain name in the URL).
If you'd like to turn off curl's verification of the certificate, use
 the -k (or --insecure) option.

So what is the recommended way to install a CA bundle? Or should I just go insecure (-k works)?

I've got a bad code duplication problem where we cannot tell which versions of packages/procedures are being used. i.e. I have different packages with procedures of the same name and I need to be sure which packages are not actually being called.

I'm trying to eliminate procedures/packages of the same name which are no longer being called. I'd like to run the trace for a few weeks, combine the data and query the metadata against it and find candidates for further investigation and deactivation.

I have data like this:

Date/Time, Source, EventType

I want a tool to be able to run on this data (I can format it or put it in a database or anything), but I want to be able to see trends - like weekdays, volume by source, relative volume of different sources, etc.

Something easy to use.

I can write my own SQL queries and things like that, but I'm looking for something off the shelf which has good graphs and things so I can spend more time playing with it to learn about the data instead of writing something myself and spend all my time writing the tool.

The domain account (a slightly-reduced privilege account for managing servers) we're installing with is a member of the administrators group on the machine, but doesn't seem to have exactly the same group policy as the domain administrators, because when installing a database with dbca (specifically, when attempting to set up the services), we get:

Cannot open the Windows NT Service Control Manager
O/S-Error: (OS 5) Access is denied.

This error is identical to that from oradim -new -sid DATABASENAME

DIM-00014: Cannot open the Windows NT Service Control Manager.
O/S-Error: (OS 5) Access is denied.

We noticed that going into the services control panel with this user gives a warning, which you can continue from and then start and stop services just fine. The same user on a Windows Server 2003 (should be same group policy) does not get any warning going into the services.

The domain administrators do not see such a warning when entering the services control panel, and they are also able to get past this error when running dbca.

Is there a specific permission which has changed with Windows Server 2008 which we need to add to our group policy or something?

I have several servers hosting data for the same application, and I want to see the results of the same query from different servers.

Disclaimer: I am not a DBA. I am a database developer.

A DBA just sent a report to our data stewards and is planning to remove the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account from the sysadmin role on a bunch of servers. (The probably violate some audit report they received).

I see a MSKB article that says not to do this.

From what I can tell reading a variety of disparate information on the web, a bunch of special services/operations (Volume Copy, Full Text Indexing, MOM, Windows Update) use this account even when the SQL Server and Agent service etc are all running under dedicated accounts.

I've been reading the article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345146(SQL.90).aspx in preparation for implementing some partitioning.

I have several tables I want to partition on a DATA_DT_ID integer, and I'd really like to be able to handle this very simply - add new partitions on the end as I publish a new month of data, remove partitions from the back end as they are expired.

But the article shows a relatively complex series of steps required to do this.

Has anyone created any stored procedures to automate this? This would seem to be a fairly common and general problem in data warehousing.