Aaron Alton's questions

This is probably a case of "if I new what it was called, I could google it in 5 minutes" - but I don't know what it's called.

It's probably best to explain the requirement using an example. We have a number of services (vpn, owa, etc) which we host from one of our datacenters. We have a number of datacenters, and we technically have the infrastructure already in place to support these services at a number of our datacenters. To provide access to these "services", I would create an external DNS entry (ex. VPN.MyCompany.com > Gateway IP for one of my DCs), and clients will connect to it via the DNS entry. Since I have multiple datacenters that can support this service, I could theoretically offer a "highly available, geographically dispersed" solution if I could point this DNS entry to some sort of third party who offers highly available "redirection" services. If my primary site goes down, I could just make a change via some management console and configure the redirector to point to a different DC. Of course, it would be fairly straightforward to set this sort of thing up on one of our servers, but that would kinda defeat the purpose of a highly available third party.

Is anyone familiar with a service like this? I'm thinking something like DynDNS, but with Enterprise availability guarantees.

I'm trying to track SharePoint adoption in our environment. Not looking for anything as sophisticated as "how extensively are our users accessing SharePoint" - just "how many distinct users are logging into SharePoint each month. All users are logging in via Windows Authentication.

Any ideas?

This is probably a ridiculously simple question, but here goes...

I'm troubleshooting an issue where an application (SQL Server Analysis Services) becomes unavailable for anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds at a time, multiple times per day. I've run monitoring locally on the application server, and have verified that the services aren't going down at any point, which makes me suspect a network issue - either a dropped connection or something is flooding the network.

The problem is, I have no idea how to monitor the network connection between two servers on an ongoing basis. I'm a DBA - that's not my shtick ;-)

As I said, the "downtime" is very brief, so it's not like I have the opportunity to ping the AS server when I receive an alert. Is there something that I can run to monitor the connection (round-trip time, maybe) between the two boxes?

The controllers on one of my cluster's SAN's are periodically restarting themselves. Apparently it can be fixed by a firmware update, but until we can apply the update in a few days, I have to live with the issue. The problem is, if one of them fails while DBCC CHECKDB is running (during nightly maintenance), CHECKDB hangs. I can't seem to kill it....it shows that it's waiting on ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION forever. Do I need to cycle the instance, or is there another way to kill CHECKDB?

SQL Server 2005 RTM & SP2 instances.

Our Exchange server is getting slammed with anywhere between 450,000 and 700,000 spam messages per day. We receive about 1700 legitimate messages in the same time frame.

Roughly 75% of the spam is directory harvesting. We currently have GFI MailEssentials installed. To it's credit, it's doing a very good job, but the sheer volume of spam that we're receiving, and the number of connections that our exchange server is making is preventing legitimate email from being delivered in a timely manner.

GFI is set up to check for directory harvesting at the SMTP level, which I presume intercepts the mail before it hits the Exchange services , or goes through SMSE. This "module" is ordered at the top of the list, so (hopefully) dealing with the harvesting is consuming a minimum amount of server resources and bandwidth.

My question is, is there anything I can do to prevent our Exchange server's connection pool from being eaten up by these spam hosts? We had to limit the number of concurrent connections being made by Exchange, because it was consuming all of our bandwidth.

Thanks, in advance.