The Blog of Matthew Baxter-Reynolds

A while ago I found this excellent site for creating those “loading” or “busy” graphics that appear on Ajax-based sites. Took me about an hour to find it, but here it is: http://www.ajaxload.info/. It is most clever. Give it the colours you use and the type of graphics you want and it will provide you with an appropriate animated GIF file.

We have an issue with a customer whereby they have a whole farm of servers running an application, but each server has been setup using a variety of approaches towards SQL Server instances – some are the regular default instance, some are named instances, not all the same names.

We needed to be able to add dependencies to the SQL Server service from the command line after the fact. Turns out this can be done using the where-have-you-been-all-my-life sc.exe:

To add a dependency to the default SQL Server instance:

sc config “soupy twist service” depend= mssqlserver

(That space after “depend=” is important, btw.)

If you want to do the same for a named instance:

sc config “soupy twist service” depend= mssql$<name>

e.g.

sc config “soupy twist service” depend= mssql$foobar

I have a machine at home that, for reasons unknown, works prefectly well when running but if you happen to reboot it the thing will not start properly. It will keep rebooting and crashing for sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes several hours, until it runs.

Imagine my joy at having Windows do an automatic update and keep popping up that “restart now” dialog every five minutes.

Apparently you can temporarily disable the popup it by stopping the Automatic Updates service. Thanks to this blog that pointed me in the right direction: http://asymptomatic.net/2005/08/11/831/how-to-disable-that-blasted-restart-now-message-from-windows-update…

SharePoint can be an excellent repository for email, but it works really well when using a SharePoint email filing system like Topaz Filer… read more.

In early 2005 we had a problem at MBRIT in that we had customers hosting applications at hosted data centres like Rackspace and Fasthosts, but for business continuance we wanted to make sure customers had up-to-date backups available at their HQ. What we did to solve this problem was build BootFX DBGet. What this utility does is download SQL Server backup files over the Web and restore them onto a target server in a customer’s private data centre.

It works in conjunction with WinZip – our motivation for using this back in 2005 was that it was able to handle multiple-gigabyte database files and backup using AES-256 encryption.

Thus the arrangement is as follows:

- Configure SQL Server to backup the database,
- Use WinZip’s command line utility from a scheduled batch file to create an encrypted ZIP file containing the backup,
- Download the ZIP file over HTTPS to customer HQ,
- Unzip the backup file,
- Archive the backup file (e.g. keep last ‘n’ copies),
- Restore the backup file to a SQL Server instance,
- Email the operator to tell them that it was all finished.

I honestly believe this utility is a great way of making sure that you have regular backups of offsite data hosted onsite. There is a limitation in terms of database size/bandwidth, but for most of the applications we have used this for it has worked brilliantly. Remember, although most hosting companies provide backup space, any commercial failure of said hosting company could cause you significant downtime.

You can download BootFX DBGet from here.