Anith Gopal

Have you ever wondered what would happen if, in Operations Manager, you’d delete a Management Server or Gateway that managed objects (such as network devices) or has agents pointing uniquely to it as their primary server? The answer is simple, but not very pleasant: you get ORPHANED objects, which will linger in the database but you won’t be able to “see” or re-assign anymore from the GUI. So the first thing I want to share is a query to determine IF you have any of those orphaned agents.

En el post de hoy, les quiero compartir un tip, que consideré importante, últimamente he tenido en las sesiones de soporte acceso a varias técnicas que utilizan los partners, clientes y administradores de bases de datos, cuando se refiere a remover actividad de usuario para Dynamics GP desde SQL Server.

Für Entwickler mit MSDN Subscription war der RC ja schon Anfang der Woche verfügbar. Jetzt auch für alle, die keine MSDN Subscription haben hier zum Download. Viel Spass Chris

Sanjay Mishra just published the following White Paper, ” Data Compression: Strategy, Capacity Planning and Best Practices “, highly recommended and much anticipated. On this same topic, I received a question from a colleague the other day, asking what the impact of data compression on memory was.  The assumptions I had were as follows: Page or Row compression allows for more data to fit in memory (compressed page on disk matches compressed page in the buffer cache) When the data is read from memory for use in a query – it is uncompressed during that time A little unsure of the specifics, I still wanted confirmation on these assumptions, so thank you to Sunil Agarwal for confirming that this was correct.  Compressed data does reside in the buffer pool in a compressed form (which you can test in a before/after data compression using sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors), but when compressed data is referenced, it is uncompressed as needed.  Sanjay’s paper also discusses this topic in more detail in the “Application Workload” section.

If you have more than a dozen web servers in a cluster with identical setting, and you need to update the virtual directory, it is much more convenient to write a simple program to update it.

In this posting I am sharing a simple but useful function that you might need to use in many of your scripts. This is a function that returns true if a given AD object exists provided its identity.

Inhaber einer MSDN Subscription können seit Donnerstag den offiziellen Release Candidate (RC) von Windows 7 herunterladen.

Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate)에 소개된 XP Mode 기능을 이용하려면, Windows 7 설치 후에 Windows XP Mode Beta를 잇달아 설치해야 합니다. MSDN Subscription을 이용하시는 분은 MSDN Subscription 내려받기 사이트에서 응용프로그램 –> Windows Virtual PC –> Windows XP Mode Beta를 찾아 설치하시면 됩니다.

Hi Cluster fans,   In Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering the “Validate a Configuration…” tool was introduced which analyzes all components of the cluster to ensure it will work after deployment.   One of the tests will inventory the updates/QFEs/hotfixes installed on the cluster nodes and report back if the cluster nodes are not at the same patch level

SQL Compact Replication initial subscription may take significant time on devices.

Here  I talked about a technique to convert SOAP faults into JSON objects for AJAX scenarios. The post was primarily around using WCF extensibility to send back exception details as JSON object with a particular HTTP status code . The code will only works with native XMLHttpRequest object or with a library which returns bare HTTP response (Ext JS, jQuery etc)

One common problem I see with Active Directory implementations is an Active Directory topology that is not fully routable.  In a fully routable environment every domain controller (DC) can communicate with every other DC.  In reality what while most customer “think” they have a fully routable environment in reality they do not.  In some cases there are multiple firewalls between the DCs that are blocking ports or DCs connected across VPN links that do not have the proper ports open.  For more information on how Active Directory replication works read the articles in the RESOURCES section below. Here are the ports required by Active Directory as described in the “Service Overview” link below. Application protocol                           Protocol                                  Ports Global Catalog Server                               TCP                                      3269 Global Catalog Server                               TCP                                      3268 LDAP Server                                            TCP                                      389 LDAP Server                                            UDP                                      389 LDAP SSL                                               TCP                                      636 LDAP SSL                                               UDP                                     636 IPsec ISAKMP                                         UDP                                     500 NAT-T                                                      UDP                                    4500 RPC                                                        TCP                                     135 RPC randomly allocated high                     TCP                                 1024 – 65535 The PORTQRY utility can be found in the Windows Server 2003 Support Tools and the newest version can be found in the links that follow.  PORTQRY can be used to test connectivity on a port or range of ports from one server to another.  For example to test TCP port 389 from the current computer to a server named VDC02 you would type the following command: PORTQRY – n VDC02 -e 389 -p TCP The query will return a great deal of information when you query 389 but you should see a line similar to the following if port 389 is reachable and able to respond: TCP port 389 (ldap service): LISTENING In order to speed up the process of testing you can use a batch file with a FOR loop in it to read server names from a text file and perform several ports test against a server.  The sample script shown below will perform some basic testing but you might need to perform more detailed analysis if you are having problems.