Moving the WSUS database

We use WSUS 3.0 on our corporate network in order to maintain Microsoft patches for the 5,000+ computers.  For the last seven or eight months, everything had been running smoothly.  I received a call from the network engineer in charge of that server this past Tuesday.  He said that he couldn’t connect to the admin interface and he had a lot of SQL errors in the event log.

When I looked at the logs, I saw that the errors were for licensing.  A default installation of WSUS will install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Embeded Edition. This version of SQL Server is limited version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition that only allows connections from a short list of Microsoft products (i.e. WSUS, Sharepoint, etc.).  SQL Server Express Edition has a file size limit of 4 GB (database files, not logs) and the WSUS database had grown over that limit.

I told the engineer that we should move the database to my SQL Server 2005 Enterprise cluster.  Not only would that allow us to have a larger database, it would be much faster than the embedded SQL Server he was running on the WSUS server.  I found the instructions for performing the move on the Microsoft Technet Windows Server Update Services site.  The article is called Migrating from Windows Internal Database to SQL Server 2005.

There were two things I had to do in order to make the WSUS server work with my SQL Server cluster. Under Migrating the WSUS database from a Windows Internal Database instance to a SQL Server 2005 instance on a remote server:

Our WSUS server is running much better now. The engineer told me that the reports he pulls from the WSUS admin interface run a lot quicker thanks to the better SQL Server. Adding the WSUS database to the SQL Server caused a very small resource hit, even while running large reports that perform multiple queries. I was glad that something went right this week. :)

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. – Herm Albright

21.Sep.08 Microsoft SQL, Networking, Software, Technology Comments (6)

Recovering grades

Summer, for the school system, is not a time of rest and fun. No friends, it is a crazy time of working fast and trying to get everything ready for the fall. The frenzied work can really be seen in the IT department. Computers have to be ghosted (updated WinXP, new software, etc.), wireless controllers/AP’s installed and new network equipment is set up.

This year was made even more fun because all of the high school teachers had their own laptops. The laptops were taken up the day after the last day of school. An email went out to all of the teachers and principals letting them know when and where to bring their laptops. The email also informed them to back up any important data to their user directory because the laptops were going to be reloaded.

One teacher got a little too delete happy. When he brought his laptop to us, he said, “I accidentally deleted all of the final grades for my class.” What!?!?! That’s right people. Instead of uploading his grade file daily to the grades server, he kept them on his laptop so he could work on them at home and only uploaded every 9 weeks. That’s a bad practice in and of itself. We asked him why he did that but he didn’t really have a good answer (shock?).

So what did we do? We Recuva‘d (bad form, booooooooo) his files. Recuva is made by the same company that makes CCleaner and Defraggler. Recuva can be installed on the local machine or carried on a portable drive (just copy the extracted executable). I took the hard drive out of the teacher’s laptop and put it in an external enclosure the school technician had. The drive was then connected to the tech’s laptop, which I had downloaded Recuva onto, and we ran the deep scan to see if we could retrieve the file.

Recuva has a really nice GUI that shows you if a file can be recovered or if it has already been overwritten by other files. Thankfully, the grade file that held all of the class final grades was able to be recovered. The teacher was happy because that saved him a weekend of re-entering all of the grades manually. I was happy because that’s one more person that owes me a favor. ;)

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them. – Elbert Hubbard

04.Jun.08 School Work, Software Comments (0)

Don’t be a Ted

Every IT department has a Ted. Ted is a decent tech. He does the work he *has* to do but sometimes must be pushed a little to do the other work. Yesterday was one of those days that Ted needed a push. Unfortunately, the pushing got old so I ended up fixing a problem myself.

One of the executives, Sarah, had a problem with her Outlook Web Access. She could connect to the web interface and read her messages but she couldn’t send any messages. Every time she tried to send an email, Internet Explorer 7 would crash. This problem had been going on for almost 3 weeks. Ted couldn’t find why IE7 crashed so he installed Firefox. Problem solved on his end.

Well, Sarah could send emails but she couldn’t change font settings (e.g. bold, font size) using Firefox. She wanted to use IE but all of her request for help fell on Ted’s deaf ears. The frustration got to the point yesterday that she finally came down to the desk/cubicle where Ted sits in order to ask him to come fix her problem. For some unknown reason, Ted was throwing out one excuse after another for why he couldn’t come today. I could tell Sarah was getting upset so I told her I’d come and look at the problem.

Sarah pulled up OWA using IE and showed me how it would crash when sending an email. I had never seen that problem before so I did a Google search. The second or third result gave me the steps to correct the issue. All I had to do was uninstall Outlook Web Access S/MIME Control. I had Sarah send me a test email just to be sure it was working. The email went through and she was really happy. Three weeks of Sarah’s problem being ignored was fixed by doing a two minute Google search.

Why Ted didn’t really try to fix the issue is a mystery. Even when I asked him about it, I one lame answer after another. He did tell me that I did a good job. Thanks Ted.

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week. – Robert Frost

13.May.08 Software Comments (2)

The order of operation

The clients I did some work for a couple of weeks ago called me this past Thursday. They had purchased a 250 GB external hard drive (USB2) and they wanted to save the server backups to it. Symantec Backup Exec supports saving to external hard drives so I thought it would be a pretty simple task. Well, it kind of was….

After setting the external hard drive up in Backup Exec, I created a second backup job. The new backup job was set up almost exactly the same as the job that backs up to tape (full nightly backups). I tried testing the new backup job and it failed. I looked through the error log and noticed that it was showing zero available space on the media. Weird, considering that it was a newly formatted drive and I made sure that the size was set up correctly in the Backup Exec device manager. I tried changing a couple of settings on the device but nothing worked. Finally, after complete frustration was setting in, I searched the Backup Exec forums.

It seems that Backup Exec has a funny little issue with testing a job that has never ran before. According to one of their FAQ entries, I needed to run the job before I could test it. That’s right, run the job first before it could test if the job would run. I changed the settings so that only a couple of small files would be backed up and it ran successfully. I then changed the settings back so that everything would be backed up and ran a test run. That test run now succeeded.

Maybe one day Symantec will fix it so that you can test jobs first. That would make a little more sense.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. ~Henry Louis Mencken

07.Apr.08 Software Comments (3)

I agree…no…maybe

I was at a medical office yesterday morning setting up their server. There were two main pieces of software to install. The first was Symantec Backup Exec and the other was Dawning Technologies DTI Interface Software.

When I started installing the Dawning software, I got the following EULA. Is it really that simple or is it a trick?

DTI Utilities EULA screen shot

I just feel like there is something they aren’t telling me.

30.Mar.08 Humor, Software Comments (0)

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