I have come across a very useful site that contains an iso to create a boot disk that will allow you to reset a local administrator password.
Check out http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd
It uses a version of Linux to boot the pc, mount the NTFS disk and edit the section of the machines registry to reset the password to whatever you need

This is very useful in cases where the machine has fallen out of your active directory or the domain admin accounts password is not cached so you can log it on.

If you business is anything like ours, you’ll have racks full of blade server to look after. When it comes to setting them up in can sometimes be a pain. Recently we have been building our dell poweredge 1855′s by re-creating the mirror from an existing server:

1. First thing, make sure you change the local admin password on the source sever if you dont know it already.
2. Pull the second disk out of the source server (normally 0:1), this will break the mirror.
3. Pull both disks out of the server you want to build. Put one of the disks into the source server so it re-builds the mirror.
4. Turn off the destination server. On the destination server, put the disk from the source server into the first slot (normally 0:0)
5. Boot the server, go into the bios. and turn off the network cards so it wont conflict with the existing server
6. Once the os has loaded, login, delete any network teams you might have setup, re-name the server to its new name and pull it out of the domain. Reboot.
7. Before the server reboots, go into its bios again and re-enable its network
8. When the os has loaded, login (you’ll have to go in as the local admin, I hope you changed the password!), re-create any network team you might have and re-join the domain

Once you have done this you should have a copy of the source server, easy! The main problem with doing this was to re-create the mirror on the destination server. Normally you’d just put the disk back in and it would re-create the mirror.

Problem is you cant just put it back in and it re-mirrors because its already got a signature from the previous server.
Sometimes as the server comes up it will recognize the new disk and re-create the mirror, but sometimes you have to go into the controller card (ctrl+m on the dell) and set the new disk to be the secondary, it will warn you its going to blow the old disk away but just ok it and it should re-sync the disks.

Not really been learning to much new over the last couple of weeks. We have been moving the Isle of Mans system ‘mainland’ and integrating them into ours.
Found a useful feature of the SQL 2005 Enterprise manager though. We were doing a lot of dumping and loading databases, and wanted to write a SQL script that would do it, but couldn’t find the correct syntax.
My boss then noticed that you can get Enterprise manager to ‘script’ certain tasks. Restoring a database was on of them. When you do the restore there is an option at the top left, it will save to a script what is currently set, or output it to a new window. Very Useful.

On another project I found out how to send optional parameters to a SQL stored procedure. When you declare the variables, make them = Null and you don’t have to pass anything!

For quite a while, we have had a problem with our main instance of SQL server not using all the memory available to it on the server. We have finally found out what the problem was thanks to this article - http://www.sql-server-performance.com/sql_server_performance_audit5.asp

The scenario is we have a clustered instance of SQL, that can run on one of 3 identically spec’d server running Windows2003 Enterprise, SQL 2000 Enterprise and with 16gig of ram.

The sqlsvr process had only been running at about 3gig of memory, and was causing us some performance issues on busy days. We had found some articles about changing boot.ini that told windows to use the extra memory, but it didn’t seam to help. Here are the steps:

1. Open up boot.ini (its normally hidden but lives in the root of c:\)
2. At the end of the line for the OS you boot to, add /3GB /PAE. This basicly tells Windows 2003 that it and SQL server have access to more than 4gig of Ram, and they can use it
3. Next you have to set the ‘awe enable’ option of SQL server to 1. This enables the API in SQL server and give it access to the extra memory
4. Open up SQL query analyser, and type:
   sp_configure ‘awe enabled’, 1
   go
   Reconfigure with overide
   go
5. When you have done this, restart the server. When you bring it back up, SQL server should have access to all the memory available in the system. You can now tell SQL server how much memory to use in the servers properties, but you now have to specify a a specific amount and not a range.

Also something else I found while doing this, the port that a clustered instance of SQL runs on is 1267, the port it runs on when not clustered is 1433.