Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

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SQL Server 2005 Server Level Collation Sequence

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Installing a new SQL Server 2005 instance that requires SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation sequence at the server level. This is the install default if the server’s Regional Settings are English (United States) – this particular server wasn’t. Found plenty of information online regarding changing the server collation sequence but the exact process escaped me. Below is really just about formatting the command but may help someone…

To change the server level collation, a rebuild of system databases is required. Do this by running setup.exe (the installer) from the command line. The following command from Books Online (search for ‘run setup from command prompt’) is exactly what is required:

start /wait \setup.exe /qn INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER REINSTALL=SQL_Engine REBUILDDATABASE=1 SAPWD= SQLCOLLATION=

Note the location is specified. This is required even though you will be running this from the location that setup.exe is in. I was running it from a local folder path (not a CD/DVD drive) and it required the path to setup.exe in full (i.e. can’t just use “setup.exe /qn …” even if your are at the location setup.exe is in) otherwise it would fail to locate SQLRun_SQL.msi or SQLrun.msi, can’t recall which.

The /qn switch which is for msiexec. It will run the setup process with no UI, it could also run with /qb, probably just as fine.

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Exchange 2007 – 0×8004010F Object could not be found

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Post reboot of an Exchange public folder & mailbox server, this error was received by Outlook 2003 clients. Outlook 2007 clients had no problems. Reason is because the public folder database was offline, i.e. failed to mount. The following services had failed to start: Information Store, System Attendant and Service Host.

After restarting these services successfully, the Information Store was able to mount the PF database and the error is cleared for the clients. The PF database stored the offline address book for these clients and that was the object that could not be found.

This MS KB article, covers a different reason that the same error might be seen client side – because the selected OAB for the mailbox database the client was located on had an invalid (old, deleted, ???) offline address book configured.

Also, the reason that the services originally failed to start appears to be because the IS service was unable to contact an Active Directory domain controller when starting up:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeIS
Event Category: General
Event ID: 1121
Date: 10/8/2009
Time: 12:00:46 PM
User: N/A
Computer: PAC-MSG-HTR1
Description:
Error 0×96f connecting to the Microsoft Active Directory.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Possibly an idea to set the recovery action of these services to restart in X minutes time, especially if the site is recovering from a power outage or some other reason that both the Exchange servers and AD servers would be down or restart at the same time.

Finally, this link [msexchangeteam.com] has lots of good information on the various possible scenarios resulting in an 0×800401oF MAPI error

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Find All Files Owned By A User – Windows Server 2003

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

If you have quotas enabled on a Windows file server, you may need to locate where all the files a user owns are to work out why their quota just keeps going up and up (and up)…

FSUtil in Windows Server 2003 can do just that (and a lot more). Use the following syntax to find all files owned by a specific user:
fsutil file findbysid <userid> <path>

Userid can be the user’s windows login and the path should be the base directory, it will recurse through sub-directories. Script it up a little and you can get a decent report of quota usage by path.

There is a whole bunch of file server administrative tasks that can be scripted using FSUtil. Very, very good.

Also, this tool (delybown.exe) looks cool, though i haven’t tried it but if it works as advertised would definitely be useful.

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Removing An Orphaned DFS Root Target

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

So, a DFS root target has disappeared. Could be because the server broke bad enough to never be able to be recovered back in to AD or because it was previously a domain controller that has been demoted and decommissioned. In any case, you will get an error from dfsgui saying, “Access is denied” when you try to remove a DFS root target that no longer exists.

Use the dfsutil command to first backup the DFS namespace and then remove the orphaned reference:

1. If not already installed, install the Support Tools for Windows Server 2003

2. Start -> All Programs -> Windows Support Tools -> Command Prompt

3. Backup the DFS namespace, type:

dfsutil /root:<fully_qualified_name> /export:<file>

(<fully_qualified_name> will be the namespace, e.g. \\mydomain\dfsroot and <file>, for example, c:\dfs.txt)

4. Open the file you exported it to, it will show you the reference to the orphaned server and will include a field called ‘Folder’.

5. Remove the reference, type (all on one line):

dfsutil /UnmapFtRoot /Root:<fully_qualified_name>

/Server:<server_name> /Shared:<folder>

(<server_name> is the name of the orphaned server and <folder> is the value from Step 4 above

6. Open or refresh dfsgui and the old root target will be gone.

Be careful to ensure that there is another root target available for the DFS namespace because otherwise the namespace will be deleted.

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