Sean Earp's questions

Quick sanity check - If I nest an Active Directory distribution group within an Active Directory Security group, will permissions assigned to the AD Security group cascade to the members of the distribution group nested within the security group, or do I need to convert the distribution group to a mail-enabled security group?

The context (if it helps) is that another team has given me a security group to use to give permissions to their team, and after granting permissions to that security group, nobody has permissions. Looking at the membership of that security group, it is a distribution group containing their people. I assume that is why it is not working, but just wanted a confirmation before I push back.

I know it is possible to migrate a CA between Domains within an Active Directory forest (as per http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742388(WS.10).aspx), but is it possible to migrate a CA from one trusted forest to another? Any caveats?

I am trying to troubleshoot communication between two servers on a Windows network where IPSEC is encrypting everything. I installed wireshark on the source server and captured traffic at the point that the communication is failing, but other than a few ARPs and DNS packets, everything else that is captured is an ESP (Encapsultating Security Payload) encrypted packet.

I would understand this if I were doing a man-in-the-middle capture, but I am on the source machine. Is there a way to specify that Wireshark capture farther up the stack (after the decryption is complete)? Source machine is W2K8R2 running as a Hyper-V VM if it matters.

Question is not on StackOverflow because I am not a developer and hope there is a way to do this without code :)

In SharePoint 2007, is it possible to have a list column do a lookup against a SharePoint Profile?

I would like to be able to create a list with a Person/Group column, and then once I add a user, have the list autopopulate a few columns (such as Manager) pulled from that user’s profile in SharePoint. Is that something that can be done OOB?

Every once and a while I see stories about a site being hacked, but it turns out that the domain registration just expired and someone else grabbed the domain and redirected DNS. I've also been to sites with invalid SSL certificates that have expired.

So... question is, how do you keep track of these registrations (that may be paid for for years at a time?) so that they can be renewed in a timely manner? Most registrars will send reminder e-mails when renewal time is coming up, but that doesn't help if they are sent to an admin that left the company a year ago.

Just curious...

After reading the excellent Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server white paper, I want to make sure that an inherited SharePoint Server running on Windows Server 2003 is not suffering from misaligned partitions. The basic formula given is to divide the starting partition offset by the stripe size for the volume. In my case, volume is a RAID array running off a Dell PERC 5/i controller.

Question: How can I find the stripe unit size? Dell Openmanage seems to tell me everything except the stripe size, and according to the aforementioned article, Windows does not have a reliable way to determine stripe unit sizes.

Today is SQL day for me :)

I have a maintenance plan that is failing to run with the following error:

Failed:(-1073548784) Executing the query "USE [SharedServices1_DB]" failed with the following error: "Database 'SharedServices1_DB' cannot be opened because it is offline.". Possible failure reasons: Problems with the query, "ResultSet" property not set correctly, parameters not set correctly, or connection not established correctly.

where SharedServices1_DB is a database that is set to offline. I would like to exclude this database from the maintenance plan, but when the database is offline, it does not show up at all as a "specific database" in the maintenance plan task, and if I bring it online, it is already unchecked in the maintenance plan task.

How can I exclude an offline database from a maintenance plan?

The SQL Server sp_spaceused stored procedure is useful for finding out a database size, unallocated space, etc. However (as far as I can tell), it does not report that information for the transaction log (and looking at database properties within SQL Server Management Studio also does not provide that information for transaction logs).

While I can easily find the physical space used by a transaction log by looking at the .ldf file, how can I find out how much of the log file is used and how much is unused?

I am trying to clear up an ugly maintenance plan on SharePoint databases that happen to also be backed up by Data Protection Manager (which is setup to take snapshots at 15-minute intervals). The business would like to separately perform backups of the content using the built-in SQL tools. Will performing database backups, transaction log backups, and/or transaction log truncation within SQL Management Studio interfere with the DPM backups/restores?

This is a tossup between whether it belongs on Stack Overflow or Server Fault (but since I am not a developer, and am looking for a no-code solution, I'm starting with SF).

Is there an easy way to populate a SharePoint list with data from an external SQL database? In SharePoint designer, it is a simple matter to create a connection to a SQL database for using the data view web part, but I need the data from a SQL table to populate a SharePoint list. Is there a no-code way to do so?

Edit: Although there are certainly ways of exporting data from the SQL table and importing it into my list, I am looking to have the connection be live so that a column in my SharePoint list is always up-to-date with a master data source stored in a different SQL database.