Jim's Posterous Blog

A place for random stuff
 

Adding SQL Reporting Services to existing cluster

This morning I had to add SQL Reporting Services to an existing SQL 2008 fail-over cluster. I started the installation selected the existing cluster instance and added the Reporting Services feature. However, when I reached the Installation rules page I got the below failure on the Existing clustered or cluster-prepared instance check. 

"The instance selected for installation is already installed and clustered on computer xxx. To continue, select a different instance to cluster."

After some investigation I found the following statement buried in the SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering white-paper. 

"Note: SQL Server 2008 does not support adding features to an existing failover cluster instance, so Analysis Services cannot be added to an existing instance of SQL Server. To share a resource group with an instance of SQL Server, you must choose to install Analysis Services during the initial installation of SQL Server."

While this is referring to Analysis Services it must also apply to SQL Reporting Services. To get around the issue I carried out a stand alone installation of SQL Reporting Services in "FilesOnlyMode" and used the Reporting Services Configuration tool to create the databases on the fail-over cluster instance. 

I then carried out the same process on the other node in the cluster to create a scale-out deployment as documented here.

All in all quite a frustrating experience, but I got there in the end.

Posted June 11, 2010
 

User renames not being recognised

I recently resolved a problem where one of our applications wouldn't recognise the user type of accounts renamed in Active Directory. The solution was fairly generic so I thought I'd document it here in the hope that it'll help someone else.

Basically if you renamed an account in AD and then signed into the application it would still believe you had the old user name. This was proved by navigating to a test aspx page containing the following

<% =System.Web.HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name %>

Curiously if you rebooted the server the correct user name was identified so clearly information was being cached somewhere. After some further investigation (by which I mean judicious use of Google) I stumbled across the following Microsoft Knowledgebase Article - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946358. 

In a nut shell disabling the local SID cache fixed the problem, renamed users simply needed to re-authenticate to pick up the change to their username.

Posted June 8, 2010
 

Operating System Analogies

According to Security expert Charlie Miller "Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town." 

I'd be inclined to agree but it's left me thinking what is Linux or more specifically FreeBSD? The only analogy I can come up with is like living on your own in an underground nuclear bunker with no doors or windows....after Armageddon.

I'm sure you can do better... 

Posted March 19, 2010
 

GD Library versions and Ubuntu

I'd been having a problem with GD being out of date on a LAMP installation on Ubuntu. This was odd because the installation is the latest (9.10) release. After some digging, it would seem that in Ubuntu PHP5 is not compiled with the version of GD that comes bundled with PHP! 

There's a really helpful article explaining how to recompile PHP5 with support for the latest version of GD here. You'll probably need to update the directories and file names depending on the release you're using but it worked for me.

Posted January 14, 2010
 

Overclocking an Intel E2160

A while back I overclocked my aging Gigabyte motherboard and Intel Pentium 2160 processor. I overclocked the CPU from 1.8Ghz to 3.0Ghz and the machine has been rock solid with the CPU core temperature around 45° even under load.
 
The motherboard is a Gigabyte ga-p35-s3. Here are the settings I used;
 
CPU Clock Ratio [9x]
CPU Frequency [3.00 Ghz (333x9)]
CPU Host Freqency [333]
System Memory Multiplier [2.40]
System Voltage Control [Manual]
DDR2 Overvoltage Control [+0.1v]
PCI-E Overvoltage Control [+0.1v]
FSB Overvoltage Control [+0.1v]
CPU Voltage Control [1.50000v]
 
I hope this helps someone but of course your mileage may vary. Any changes you make as a result of this post are entirely at your own risk...
 

Posted January 4, 2010
 

Dell OpenManage on CentOS 5.4

I'd been having a problem configuring Dell OpenManage with CentOS 5.4 so I've written it up here so that;

  1. I don't forget it.
  2. It may help someone else with the same problem.
Basically when starting the daemons you'd get the following error;

/etc/init.d/dsm_om_shrsvc start
Starting DSM SA Shared Services: /bin/bash: line 1:  3119 Aborted /etc/delloma.d/oma/bin/dsm_om_shrsvc32d [FAILED]

I'd already made sure that all pre-requisites had been met and that the software installed correctly. A colleague even posted the problem on the Dell Support Forums. I got fed up waiting for a response so I installed strace to see what was going on behind the scenes. 

Looking at the system calls I could see lots of errors of the type;

open("/usr/lib/locale/en_UK.UTF-8/LC_IDENTIFICATION", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

So I ran locale which produced

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

The fix was to add;

export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

to /etc/profile and then run . /etc/profile.

Now the daemons start correctly and the locale command runs without errors.

 

Posted November 23, 2009
 

Merry Christmas!

Had the following email from Orange...

Thank you for registering your interest in the iPhone.

Orange isn’t just bringing you the iPhone. Together with the UK’s
biggest 3G network, covering more people than any other, we’re
bringing you a winning combination.

You will be eligible for an upgrade on 25/12/2009, so when the time
comes, you can enjoy one of the best handsets on the market.

Posted November 5, 2009
 

Error Code: 500 Internal Server Error. An internal error occurred. (1359)

I spent more time than I should have trying to diagnose, what turned out to be, a relatively simple problem last week.
 
We were using an ISA 2006 Array to load balance a Silverlight App between multiple web servers. Each server was added to a web farm in ISA and the rule was configured using the ISA publishing wizard. The app was accessed via the Internet over SSL with the SSL connection terminating on the ISA server.
 
Having applied the rule changes I attempted to access the website through the browser only to be greeted with a dirty great 500 internal server error. I double checked the settings for the rule and clicked the 'test rule' button and everything seemed to be correct. Slightly baffled I confirmed that I could access each of the web servers directly, and again didn't get any errors.
 
Next I clicked on the Monitoring option in ISA and navigated to the monitoring tab, I setup a filter to monitor traffic specifically for the rule and could see the requests were reaching the relevant ISA Server then bombing out with the 500 error.
 
It was only when I clicked the connectivity verifier tab that I noticed the big red x-marks next to each of the servers. It transpires that ISA had setup a connectivity verifier in the format https://*/ which had of course failed because the servers were serving requests over http not https. As each verifier failed ISA removed the offending server from the array leaving no available servers to handle requests!
 
Once I'd updated the connectivity verifier everything settled down and started working correctly.
 
In hindsight if I'd bothered to check the Event Viewer on each of the ISA servers I'd have spotted the root cause much sooner... you live and learn.

Posted October 18, 2009