SqlRyan's questions

In troubleshooting connectivity issues, our network team lacks the rights on our servers (Windows and RHEL) to connect and test connectivity (for example, when tweaking a firewall rule, a ticket bounces back and forth as they modify something, then we test, then they tweak it, then we test again, etc.), which extends troubleshooting pretty significantly. Is there a way I can allow them to run these tools from the servers in question with minimal security risk?

I know they could do this if I had TELNET or SSH enabled and they could get command line access, but I'd prefer not to open that large a gap. Is there a small "basic network tools" package I could install on my servers that's accessible via a web interface or TELNET? Just something that gives them to option to PING from that server, test connectivity over ports to other locations, etc.

If there are other solutions or I'm missing something obvious, please let me know.

We've had a single Team Foundation Server (for source code control) on our production domain for a few years (corp.ourcompany.net), and it's worked great. However, we've got a lab now and I'd like to extend source control access to developers operating there (testlab.corp.ourcompany.net). That way, developers working on code either in the lab or in the production network will have access to the same source code (This isn't a question about where to develop - I recognize it should all be in a lab of kinds, but it's not).

It's in a firewalled subset of the network, and there's no access from lab into production, so we've installed a TFS Proxy server in the lab and allowed all the necessary ports. However, since these are two different domains, I'm running into trouble - when I try to configure the proxy server, it asks for a service account that has access to the production TFS, and I can't add one:

1. When I provide an account from production (corp.ourcompany.net\ProxyAccount), it won't resolve it
2. If I use a testlab account, I can't grant this account access in production (the account needs to be able to view source code on the production server).

Do I need some kind of trust set up? I don't believe there's currently any, or if it's even an option with how we're set up, but I'm stuck - I can't seem to get the developers in the lab access to source control on the production TFS server. Even if they did have network access, I can't grant their testlab domain logins any kind of application access necessary to log in to TFS.

Am I missing something obvious? Are there other ways to get this accomplished? Other platforms may be more flexible than TFS, but I'm not ready to explore making a change there - I'm interested in a potential way to get TFS to accommodate my needs before I make the case to switch. Thanks!

We have a two-node Windows Server 2008 R2 fail-over cluster that's hosting about a dozen instances of SQL Server. The nodes each have four network adapters in them (a pair of dual-port Broadcom gigabit cards).

The heartbeat network is handled by a crossover cable, but for the three remaining adapters on each server, should these ports be teamed? I would like the traffic to be balanced across these adapters instead of overloading one primary port, but not if teaming them will cause other problems. I can find plenty of advice that you should never team the heartbeat adapter, but there seems to be nothing definitive about teaming the public adapters.

Thanks for your help!

Recently, I had our server admin tell me that the new servers we'd ordered with 140GB of RAM on them had "too much" ram and that servers started to suffer with more than about 80GB, since that was "the optimal amount". Was he blowing smoke, or is there really a performance problem with more RAM than a certain level? I could see the argument - more for the OS to manage, etc - but is that legitimate, or will the extra breathing room more than make up for the management?

I'm not asking "Will I use it all" (it's a SQL Server cluster with dozens of instances, so I suspect I will, but that's not relevant to my question), but just whether too much can cause problems. I'd always assumed that more is better, but maybe there's a limit to that.

I have a database file that's currently 150GB, but only 75GB is being used - it's because I moved all the indexes (the other 75GB) to a new data file. I'd like to reclaim at least part of the space from this data file, but when I attempt to shrink the file, it "Executes" indefinitely, eventually being cancelled because of a network interruption or something else out of my control (after a day of running). Even using the "shrink to specific size" feature and specifying that it just trim off 10MB never seems to return - it just sits until the process is interrupted.

Is there another way that I can reclaim this space, even a little at a time?

EDIT: Somebody posted a link explaining why I shouldn't shrink my database. I understand, and I want to shrink it anyways. Disk space is at a premium on this server, and the database will not expand again into this unused space for a very long time - as I stated earlier, I migrated indexes out of the data file to free up this space, so now it's wasted.

We use Business Objects Enterprise XI-R2, and there's no built-in way to back up the individual reports. We do backups of the report file share and the database, but if somebody deletes a single report, they're screwed unless we store everything to a standby instance and retrieve the report, which takes hours.

Is anybody out there doing a report-level backup of BOE, or is there an easy way to use some kind of source control system to allow for restoring a particular report?

Are there any comparisons between Hyper-V client machines and their physical equivalent? I've looked around and can find 4000 articles about improving Hyper-V performance, but I can't find any that actually do a side-by-side comparison or give benchmarking numbers.

Ideally, I'm interested in a comparison of CPU, memory, disk, and graphics performance between something like the following:

• Some powerful workstation (with plenty of RAM) with Windows 7 installed on it directly
• Same exact worksation with Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the bare Server role) and a full-screen Windows 7 client machine

Virtual Server 2005 had performance that didn't compare at all with actual hardware, but with the advances in CPU and hardware-level virtualization, has performance improved significantly? How obvious would it be to a user of the two above scenarios that one of them was virtualized, and does anybody know of actual benchmarking of this type?

On my Windows 2003 Server, the disk activity has been out of control recently - the disk queue is getting long, and I'm getting heat on the wait time for resources. I'm looking for a tool that will let me view two things:

1. What processes are causing the majority of disk accesses
2. What files are being accessed constantly

Number 2 seems more important to me, since I can identify files that might be better either compressed (to lower the size of disk reads and shift load to the processor, which is only lightly utilized) or moved to the FC SAN.

Thanks for your suggestions!

I need to troubleshoot some DNS issues on a Windows 2008 domain controller, but I see that NETDIAG isn't supplied or supported anymore. I could just copy it from a Server 2003 DC, but it looks like the output wouldn't be reliable. Everywhere I look online, people quickly say "It's not supported anymore" without giving a replacement for the functionality.

What can I use to do the same type of DNS/network diagnostics since I can't use NETDIAG?

I'm currently using the following BAT file to restart a remote service:

sc \\MyServer stop MyRemoteService
sc \\MyServer start MyRemoteService

This works great for one computer, but I want to use it to restart services in a farm. I could just list every server in my batch file, but I only want to restart services if they're already running. For example, if the service is running on one server in the farm, restart it, but if it's not already running, then leave it stopped.

Is there any way to accomplish this remotely? I'm not married to SC is there's another program that does this.

I have a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise active/passive cluster running SQL Server 2005. The "Cluster Service" service won't start on my passive node, and I'm pretty sure it's what's described in this MS KB article. However, it prescribes restarting the cluster service on the active (aka "only one of the pair that's currently working") node, and I want to know if that will cause an outage on my SQL server.

I'm pretty sure it will just bounce that service and come right back up, but since the service on the passive node fails to start, I'm a little nervous that I'm going to take down the whole cluster by restarting this service on the active node.

Any confirmation that it is/not okay?

I'd like to add wireless to my network, and I need multiple access points to cover the whole area. I'd like to set them up so that there's only one "wireless network" that the clients see, and it switches them as seamlessly as possible between access points as they wander around (if that's not possible, then at least have it so that they don't need to set up the security by hand on each one the first time, if possible).

I've searched online, and there are quite a few sets of mixed instructions (same vs different SSID, frequency, does the security need to match exactly, etc.). Can somebody who has some experience doing this please let me know what they did? I imagine it's pretty simple, but there seems to be no clear cut "yes, you can do this" online, even though I know you can.

I have a mid-size LAN with about 20 workstations and two Domain Controllers on it. Also, I'll be doing this with consumer wireless components, if it makes a difference, not enterprise-level components (ie. Linksys rather than Cisco).

I have a MDF and LDF on the same drive, and the drive is almost out of space. I have a second drive in the same server, and I'd like to move the LDF file to that drive. I know that I can detach and re-attach, but that involves downtime, and I'd like to do this transparently.

1. I created a second log file on my new drive and added it to the database, so the DB has two log files.
2. When I tried to remove the old log file, I get "Unable to remove primary log file"

All the research I did suggested that there's no way to change the "primary" log file on an online database - you have to detach it, and reattach it with just the logfile you want as primary. In an ideal world, here's how I picture that it should work:

1. Create a second log file and add it to the database
2. Set the new file as "primary", so all new log data is written there
3. DBCC SHRINKFILE, checking the option to migrate all data to other files in the same group
4. As old "primary" file is now empty, you can delete it from the database

Am I crazy? Is there a way to do this that I'm not aware of?

On a number of machines in the past, across different versions of Windows (2000, XP, and no Vista), I've enabled DisablePagingExecutive to try and improve performance. In each case, and I've had plenty of memory, and in the especially so in the current case. However, after enabling this registry tweak and rebooting, I've checked task manager after a while, and I still show a huge chunk of the kernel paged to disk, even though I have 2GB of physical memory free.

Has anybody ever used this tweak successfully? Ever? Maybe I'm viewing the wrong indicator when I check the task manager (Performance tab -> "Kernel Memory" section), but I'd like to prevent Windows from paging everything it can to disk, especially considering the amount of memory provided in desktops these days. It seems like a "Don't page to disk unless there's extreme memory pressure" option ought to exist - is there one?