Brian Knight's questions

I have a virtual network set up in Windows Azure that contains several servers in an Active Directory domain. The domain computers are unable to access the Internet.

However, the internet is directly accessible from the domain controller. When I attempt to visit an external site from the other Windows Server 2008 R2 domain members, the page fails to load.

The following behavior is also observed on the domain members:

• I can perform an nslookup on "google.com" and receive the proper IP addresses from the DNS server.
• I can access websites hosted by other machines within the virtual network (and the same AD domain) via the browser.
• When the server has the same IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway set via DHCP (instead of statically), the internet connection works.

Based on above, I am ruling out a DNS or a Windows Firewall issue. The browser also seems to be working fine also. But I am at a loss to determine the issue.

Why is my VM unable to access the internet?

I am using a Cisco SSL VPN client to connect from a 32-bit Ubuntu 11.04 computer to a 32-bit Windows 7 computer. When I request an RDP session from the SSL VPN site, the properJavaRDP plugin fires up, makes a connection to the server, and then returns the following error:

Connection Exception Wrong Modulus size! Expected64+8got:264

My session can never get past that point. Has anyone seen this error before and have any clue how to resolve it? Thanks!

I have a single instance of SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services running on Windows Server 2008 x64 with 8GB of RAM on the server. All of the settings for memory are left to their defaults.

When the SSAS service starts, it behaves normally. However, whenever a query is run against the instance, the SSAS service continually will consume all of the memory on the server, to the point that the server needs to be rebooted. At present, the TotalMemoryLimit and LowMemoryLimit settings are set to 80% and 75% respectively. The HardMemoryLimit is set to 0 by default.

Why is SSAS using all of the memory on the server, despite the limit settings? Does HardMemoryLimit need to be set?

We are currently considering using Dell's EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager/Microsoft Edition (ASM/ME) to backup our SQL Server databases. However, I am extremely skeptical of this, as ASM/ME uses Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to provide a framework for backing up and restoring data.

My concern is that while the VSS backup will technically work, there is the potential for database corruption using this method since the database isn't aware of the VSS backup and cannot ensure that everything is committed before the backup.

Do Microsoft VSS-based backups work acceptably for SQL Server database backups and restores? Are there other concerns or caveats I need to be aware of?