Import UniData into SQL 2005

I have been trying to figure out how to get data from a UniData database into an SQL 2005 database to make building reports much easier. After installing the UniData ODBC tools from IBM I could not get the Import/Export wizard to connect to the ODBC.

After searching the Internet for the particulare errors I was getting I found the connection string should look like this. "Dsn=YOURDSN;Driver={IBM UniData ODBC DRIVER};uid=YOURUSER;pwd=YOURPASSWORD". As I found here http://www.bokebb.com/dev/english/2006/posts/2006108696.shtml.

Also you have to build you SELECT statements by hand, but that does not bother me as much as those other guys.

Update: 2-2-09
As of SQL 2005 SP3 this connection string no longer works in the Import/Export Wizard. Still looking into how to get it working again.

Howto: PC2724 Remote Management

If your like me one annoying issue is that the PC2724 management interface cannot be changed.  This can make it impossible to remotly manage the switch using the web interface if your using it with VLAN Trunks that will not carry VLAN1.  Example the Dell PC6248 L3 switch.  Effectivly the PC6248 VLAN1 is not routable so if your management VLAN is VLAN1 how can you manage it from a different VLAN?  You fool it!  This will work no matter what you use to do your intervlan routing.  We are using a pair of PC6248's.  I am not going to cover how to set those up.

1. Create your VLANs
   
   
   1. VLAN15 Phones
   
   
   2. VLAN20 PCs
   
   
   3. VLAN25 Management
   
   


2. Setup your uplink/trunk VLAN Membership
   
   
   1. VLAN15 Port 23+24 Tagged
   
   
   2. VLAN20 Port 23+24 Tagged
   
   
   3. VLAN25 Port 23+24 Tagged
   
   


3. Setup your uplink/trunk VLAN Port Settings
   
   
   1. Port 23+24 Admit Tag Only, PVID 1
   
   


4. Loop your management port to VLAN1
   
   
   1. Port 22 VLAN Membership 25 Untagged
   
   
   2. Port 22 VLAN Port Settings PVID 25
   
   
   3. Port 21 VLAN Membership 1 Untagged
   
   
   4. Port 21 VLAN Port Settings PVID 1
   
   


5. Connect Port 21, and 22 together.


6. Assign IP Addressing as if in VLAN25 for IP Address, Subnet, and Gateway.

Now you should be able to manage the device from any of your other VLANs. This assumes you already have your VLANs up, and InterVLAN routing working.

 

MS Hyper-V with VLANs

I just got a new mini server for my lab to run multiple virtual clients on. I ran into a huge show stopper trying to get VLANs working. Turn out that Intel NIC drivers filter VLANs so when your VM is configured to tag its traffic with a particular VLAN the host driver is discarding those packets. To get this fixed you need to modify the registry because the Intel Driver Control Panel does not have the option to disable this behavior. Search your register for "VlanFiltering" and modify its value from "1" to "0" to disable the filtering.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/11584256-b924-4945-a2f4-aefca0c3a43a/
Specifically by MikeLaschaThe Intel's were a tougher nut to crack as the settting is not exposed through the NIC's Advanced Properties, but only through the registry . Changing the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{GUID}\XXXX\VlanFiltering registry key (where {GUID} is the GUID containing the network adapter configuration and XXXX is the NIC to be confgured) from 1 to 0 and rebooting corrects the issue. The easiest way to find the proper key in your system is to use the find command in regedit with enough of the network adapter name (i.e. for the Intel's, find "1000 PT").Identifying a registry key to enable this support actually turned out to be a plus since I was able to use it to get VLAN support working in server core. So now I can use the Broadcom’s as originally planned (for host and cluster NIC’s), and the Intel’s for VM public and/or iSCSI connectivity.

Update: 12/1/08
I tried to reproduce this again on an ALB Team. I had to create/delete a VLAN from Intel ProSet before it would work. This must have enabled VLAN tagging in the registry. I could not find any other way to enable VLAN tagging on the team.

Low Profile Lab Server

I just got a new server for my lab to help with my testing of an open source WAN acceleration project I have been helping with called trafficsqueezer. Its a pretty neat little box, and is what I plan on putting in each of our office once the software is production ready. Until then I will be using it to run multiple client VMs for testing trafficsqueezer.

Here are the system specs:

• Supermicro CSE-510-200B Chassis
• Supermicro X7SBL-LN2 Motherboard
• Intel Xeon X3320 2.5GHz Quad-Core CPU
• 4GB PC 6400 ECC Memory
• 4x 2.5" Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm Drives

Installing the CPU

Installing the Memory.

Putting the board in the chassing, and installing the drives.

Server 2008, and Hyper-V installed.

Overall I am very impressed with this little thing. Getting the SATA, and power cables connected were a pain. I think 6" or 10" SATA cables will be on order soon to help get rid of some of the extra cable in the case.

Here you can see exactly what is in this system.

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=7804451

Update 4-29-2009:

I just built a 2nd one of these. They each now have 6GB of ram, and only 2x 250GB drives. Should be great for testing TraffiSqueezer

Dell PC6248 L3 Switch

A while ago we purchased some Dell PowerConnect 6248 L3 switches. I was hoping to get some Cisco L3 switches, but given the cost that was not an option. We got these for dirt cheap you might say.
In getting them setup though I found a few shortcoming.

1. Multiple DHCP Relays or lack of. This should be fixed in firmware v3 sometime 2009
2. vrrp ip address is not pingable. apparently this is according to the rfc for vrrp. Most vendors allow you to enable the pingability of the virtual ip though for troubleshooting. So far Dell does not.
3. ACE entries for ACLs limited to 13. This IMHO is lame. You can only have 13 ACE for your ACLs. If you have some complex security requirements this thing isnt going to work.
4. cannot enter descriptions for vlan interfaces.

Overall though I like the devices. You cannot beat the cost not HP, 3Com nothing comes close to how cheap these things are. So if you can live with the limitations it does have you get a really fast L3 switch for dirt cheap.

ShoreTel Server Disaster Recovery

I cannot take credit for all this so here are my sources.

http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/archive/2005/01/05/346793.aspx
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/f6972828-1e81-4cd4-ae0c-36196a82ed25/workstation-open-file-bac.aspx

Using these two scripts we have made the backup script here that copies the Shoreline Data folder onto a backup server in a different location over the network each weekend. It uses the Shadow Copy component of Windows Server 2003 so it will backup even the files that are in use by the ShoreTel phone system. This meets our disaster recovery goals of being able to bring the phone server back online within minuets of a disaster at our primary data center. The loss of changes made to the phone system during the past week is acceptable to us. You could run this backup script daily if that does not meet your goals.


1. Create a scheduled backup of ShoreTel data to your backup server according to the following:

a. You need to get three programs from Microsoft and copy them into the c:\backup folder they are.
i. Vshadow.exe
ii. Robocopy.exe
iii. Dosdev.exe

b. Next you need to create a script backup.cmd in the backup folder that contains the following “code”:

setlocal

@REM test if we are called by VSHADOW
if NOT "%CALLBACK_SCRIPT%"=="" goto :IS_CALLBACK

@REM
@REM Get the source and destination path
@REM

@rem set SOURCE_DRIVE_LETTER=d:
@rem set DESTINATION_PATH=\\sgserver2\d$\Shoreline Data

set SOURCE_DRIVE_LETTER=%~d1
set SOURCE_RELATIVE_PATH=%~pnx1
set DESTINATION_PATH=%2

@REM
@REM Create the shadow copy - and generate env variables into a temporary script.
@REM
@REM Then, while the shadow is still live
@REM recursively execute the same script.
@REM

@echo ...Determine the scripts to be executed/generated...

set CALLBACK_SCRIPT=%~dpnx0
set TEMP_GENERATED_SCRIPT=GeneratedVarsTempScript.cmd

@echo ...Creating the shadow copy...

%~dp0\vshadow.exe -script=%TEMP_GENERATED_SCRIPT% -exec=%CALLBACK_SCRIPT% %SOURCE_DRIVE_LETTER%

del /f %TEMP_GENERATED_SCRIPT%

@goto :EOF

:IS_CALLBACK
setlocal

@REM
@REM This generated script should set the SHADOW_DEVICE_1 env variable
@REM

@echo ...Obtaining the shadow copy device name...

call %TEMP_GENERATED_SCRIPT%

@REM
@REM This should copy the file to the right location
@REM

@echo ...Copying from the shadow copy to the destination path...

@rem
@rem copy "%SHADOW_DEVICE_1%\%SOURCE_RELATIVE_PATH%" "%DESTINATION_PATH%"

@rem create shadow drive.
dosdev.exe B: %SHADOW_DEVICE_1%

@rem make backup of files.
robocopy.exe "B:\%SOURCE_RELATIVE_PATH%" %DESTINATION_PATH% /MIR

@rem destory shadow drive.
dosdev.exe -r -d B:

c. You run the script by going into the c:\backup folder, and running backup.cmd “local directory to backup” “\\path to remote server\target directory\” you will need to make sure that the user that is running the script has access to both directories.

d. Now you can schedule the script to run daily/weekly/whatever.






2. Configure all ShoreTel phones, and switches to boot via DHCP to get FTP server from DHCP options.

a. See ShoreTel, and Microsoft Documentation to configure switches for DHCP, and IP address reservations in MS DHCP server for your ShoreTel switches.

3. To recover from a disaster.

a. Change the IP address of your ShoreTel server in the ShoreWare.mdb on your backup server.
i. You will need MS Access, and it’s in the switches table.

b. Install the ShoreTel software on your backup server.

c. Contact ShoreTel to get a new license as the MAC address has changed it will need re-licensed. They should do this for free as your primary server is down. You will need to do this again once you can bring your primary server back online.

d. Update your DHCP ftp option to point to the backup servers IP address.

e. Reboot your switches, and then phones.

WAN Acceleration

I have been searching for a cost effective WAN acceleration solution for work, but have found nothing. It seems that everyone wants around $150,000+ to implement WAN acceleration at our 12 offices. So I found a little project that is currently getting underway called TrafficSqueezer.

Its an open source projected dedicated to developing a network acceleration application. Looks like an interesting project.

Open Source WAN Accelerator
http://trafficsqueezer.sourceforge.net/

Reasons for a dedicated SQL server

We recently built a dedicated SQL server for a project at work. Nothing massivly huge just a Dell 2850 with dual 3.0Ghz CPUs, and 4GB of ram. However I started to think about the benefits to having a dedicated machine running your SQL databases.

Most companies like us probably end up have numerous applications that require an SQL database. Most of these install SQL Express for this. So you end up with multiple application servers all running their own instance of SQL Express. This is a huge waste of system resources. The memory, and processing power required to run SQL could be saved by running a dedicated SQL box.

We have started taking this approach, and have reduced the memory requirement of many of our application servers by moving all the databases to our dedicated SQL server.

Our applications perform better because the database is much faster. It has more memory cpu, and disk io avaliable than before. The application servers are only running the application so that makes it even faster.

Now the problems you have is that when you need to take down your SQL server all your applications come down too. We are resolving this by using database mirroring.

OpenOffice Revisited

Several years ago I evaluated the possibility of using OpenOffice as a replacement to MS Office for basic users. It fell through due to performance issue with the application, and usability when compared to the MS Office suite.

I just saw an add for OpenOffice, and thought I would give it another go. I'm actually impressed with how far it has come along so we are now evaluating it again at my current employer.

I have found several small issue with the current build 2.4 that should be address in build 3.0 such as the ability to open Office 2007 documents. However we are not using Office 2007 in any substantial way so its not that big of an issue for us.