Author: way0utwest

My Windows Home Server died a month ago, just as I was getting ready to leave the country. I didn’t have time to deal with it, but since I was still in the process of moving data over to it, I felt fairly safe. When I got back to it a couple weeks ago, I found that a disk drive had died, and it must have been the boot drive as the BIOS reported a “disk read error” on startup.

Rather than panic, I searched around and found this thread on the Microsoft site that noted how to copy data off disks. That’s an easy one, basically drop the disk in another machine, show hidden folders, look for the “data” folder. I copied all the pictures, music, and video off the drive. Backups were gone, but I was OK with that for now.

The next step was to get new drives. I isolated the broken one, RMA’d it to Western Digital, which went well, and then went out and bought a new drive. I got another 2TB drive, and an external enclosure from NewEgg. Those allow me to easily add more space since the inside of my old Dell E521 is crowded.

While waiting for new drives, I reinstalled my 1TB, 2TB, and a slightly older 320GB drive into the machine and re-ran setup for Home Server. That’s easy and I was back up. I used the same password and machine name, but I found something interesting.

My client machines could connect to the shared folders, but I couldn’t setup a backup. Must be some signature/encryption link. However if you rerun setup for the Connector software, it takes a few minutes, and then it rebuilds everything as it was.

That’s done, I’ve copied music, video, and pictures back to the Home Server for sharing, and reset backups on 2 machines. My wife needs to do hers and we’ll be protected again.

At least internally. I need to get something going offsite, at least for the photos.

I was listening to the announcement of SQL Server 2008 R2 yesterday on a call from Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing, downloadable on May 3. While listening and making notes, I wandered over to the Microsoft SQL site and was surprised to find a video montage of the Tweet-up I attended in Bellevue a couple of weeks ago.

It was an interesting event and I’d like to do it again.  I almost didn’t go after a crazy month of March for travel, but I was curious what was worth Microsoft flying 8 of us to Bellevue for a day.

It turned out to be a fun event. A wine tasting mixed with an R2 briefing and discussion of the product. Donald Farmer and Dan Jones led the briefing, while we tended to joke and make fun of them, but also talked about the product. We were tweeting like mad while this was happening, in between sips of wine, of course, and it was fun.

But it was too late in the day. Starting at 5pm PST, most of the East coast had gone home, so we had very little interaction from outside the room. We heard a few things later on from others, but the spontaneous nature of the event was lost a bit.

I think it was an interesting idea, and I would like to do it again, perhaps even at something like the PASS Summit or TechEd.

Microsoft scheduled a conference call this morning, and I jumped on since I was laid up in bed with a pinched nerve in my neck. What else did I have to do?

Actually I had work to do, but I was in pain much of the night and this morning, so I listened in on the call on the, iPhone, using the semi-multitasking capability to tweet while it was on speaker.

I had suspected this was the announcement, and it was true. They announced the RTM of SQL Server 2008 R2, which made sense since the launch was supposed to happen with the PASS Europe Summit this week. I had suspected delays after hearing the date announced as May 21 at UK Tech Days, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

I saw a blog on ZDNet that mentioned they actually finished last week, but held off until this week to make the announcement.

You can read the press release (boring) or check out the SQL site at Microsoft (more interesting) for more information. One neat announcement that I liked was the growth in the size of Express databases to 10GB. Since most dbs are apparently under 2GB, this is great news for many companies that can use this version for small, departmental apps.

In the past, when I’ve set up log shipping, it was primarily as a DR device, designed to get copies of logs to another server ASAP. The idea being that if we had an issue on the production server, we could switch to the secondary server quickly and lose minimal working time for the company.

To that end me, and most everyone I knew, restored those logs ASAP. If you ran log backups every minute, you didn’t want more than a couple of minutes before you could bring the secondary online and start moving clients over.

That’s a good process, though to a large extent it has been superseded by database mirroring for quick recovery on another server. Mirroring also includes the ability to automatically direct clients to the mirror server, which isn’t something log shipping can do.

However you don’t always want to restore those logs immediately. Not all disasters require you, or even force you, to switch servers. Consider those “accidental” disasters. What do you do if a user deletes all customers, or the DBA accidently sets all orders to the same quantity because they forgot a WHERE clause?

If you restore immediately, those changes are likely applied on the secondary server before you can even contact the DBA, or make a remote connection to the secondary server and shut off the log shipping process.

If, however, you have, say a 3rd database, one that delays restoring logs for an hour or two, you’ll still have that original data on that server. Even if you’ve made some changes in the last few hours, you could “catch up” all the logs except for the one where you made the mistake, and then move that data over with an SSIS Wizard package.

That might save you a lot of time, or explanations, when you do make a mistake. And rest assured, sooner or later you will.