I’m throwing this up here because I consistently forget the file type extension to do this. If you want to test a DB Connection String, create a new document and rename it something with the .udl extension. Double click on it and fill in the relevant information.
Oh, and as an aside, the theme should look a bit different/better here shortly. This WP install is pretty screwed up right now, so I will be reinstalling it at some point.
Well, it finally arrived. Similar to the Nook, you can now lend Kindle books to others. There are some caveats though.
Check out all information in Amazon’s help section.
During a migration from TFS2008 to TFS2010 I am currently working on, one of the things we needed to migrate is Work Items. We have three customized work items, which we need to migrate from one server to another.
The downside, is that when I am running witadmin.exe, I get the error:
TF212018: Work item tracking schema validation error: TF26177: The field System.RelatedLinkCount cannot be renamed from ‘Related Link Count’ to ‘RelatedLinkCount’.
This is happening because the xml has changed between TFS2008 and TFS2010. Talk about a pain. However, the fix is fairly painless. All you need to do is rename RelatedLinkCount in your xml that you’re trying to import to “Related Link Count”.
More than likely you will receive multiple errors that are similar. Simply rename them all, and it should import. The ones I constantly ran into:
As an aside, always test with the /v, validate, switch to ensure everything in the xml is valid.
There is a great little utility I found for importing and exporting Iteration and Path. It also makes it way easier to bulk edit items via notepad and then import. Works with TFS 2005, 2008, and 2010. Yay!
When working with programs that spawn multiple processes (i.e. BizTalk, svchost, etc), sometimes you just need to know which one of the processes is actually spinning at 100% CPU or eating all your memory. Unfortunately, task manager doesn’t really give you and details about which process it is.
In order to get the details, you need to run the following (example is for svchost)
tasklist /SVC /fi “imagename eq svchost.exe”
Just remember to open the command prompt as administrator for elevated processes.
I’m sure a lot of you have heard about Colligo for offline SharePoint. Unfortunately, the SharePoint sites that I continually access where for my company have some interesting security setup and therefore I’ve never been able to get Colligo to work. Since I had originally tried, I never really bothered to figure it out as we were told it simply wouldn’t work.
However, when I installed Office 2010 I noticed that there was a SharePoint Workspace 2010 which does offline SharePoint too. Since we only use MS products for security I was very optimistic about getting Offline SharePoint finally working (incredibly useful for working on flights). Well, I attempted to use it and quickly realized it will only do offline SharePoint for SharePoint 2010. Unfortunately we were still on 2007.
Fast forward through a bit of searching, and I ran across a nice KB article that explains how to sync a SharePoint 2007 site with SharePoint Workspace 2010 using groove. I don’t really care how it works, as long as I can have offline editing and syncing. Yay!
We’ve been having yet another performance issue that has taken awhile to fix. This one isn’t related to code though. However, it has been a nightmare to solve. Thankfully we have some Microsoft guys on sight who were able to quickly diagnose the problem and get us moving along.
Some background:
With that, we were noticing a lot of CPU activity even though we really shouldn’t have, but it was strange as CPU would peak at about 45% and the SQL would appear to become very sluggish. Running ad hoc queries took forever, and it was causing our app to run slowly too. In fact, we were normally front-end CPU bound, but when we were having these issues, the front-end sat at about 25% CPU, SQL was at 45% and there were no waits on the SQL server. It was very annoying as there was no place to point the finger at.
As I was digging through things, I noticed that the last geography we did we had set MDOP to 1 (see previous post). As I was slowly going through various SQL configurations I noticed that it was set to 0 on all of the cluster nodes. Needless to say, I talked to a few people, and 1 is apparently the default setting during their buildout, so I changed it.
Miraculously everything was solved! A quality day’s worth of work! Ran some validation steps, and then handed it off to our offshore team. The next day, I notice that the results were looking a lot worse that what I was seeing. I spin up LoadRunner (ugh, another post I should probably write about) and run a test. My results are for crap too. Looking at front-end CPU, I notice it is once again not maxing out, and SQL is running hot again.
I know how to fix this though, so I go and look at the MDOP setting. Interesting, it is still set to 1. Well, maybe something is hung someplace, so I set it to 0 then back to 1. Run the test, problem solved, move on to something else.
Well, this continually happens for the next week, and so I send an email asking if anyone has seen this before to the local DBAs and the onsite Microsoft DBAs if they have ever seen MDOP “revert”, but not really. Needless to say, they had never heard of this, but the Microsoft DBA quickly narrowed in on the fact that the cache plan is being dumped when I re-run that configuration. Looking at some memory dumps, he quickly jumped on the TokenAndPermUserStore cache. We also verified it by only flushing that cache and watching the improvements on the site.
The good news is that we are not the only ones having issues with this. MS has actually tried to fix this issue since before SP2. However, nothing, not even in SP3 has actually fixed it. Yet, in SP3 they finally added a few trace flags that can be used to manually set the size of this specific cache. Before I get to telling you how to fix it, here is what is going on.
On the previous geography our SQL tier looked the same except that we only had 24GB of RAM on the SQL nodes, plus our databases were a lot larger because of legacy data. Therefore, we have memory pressure on the box. SQL wants to load all the databases into RAM, but it can’t. Therefore, the caches are continually going through garbage collection. Now, on this current project, we have more than doubled the amount of RAM, and our databases are are tiny in comparison. In fact, all of our databases are effectively in memory. Therefore, we have no memory pressure, and the caches are never collected. They keep growing to sizes that make them useless as they are spending more time in CPU finding the corresponding item (the security token in this case) than just recreating it.
Our SQL nodes are too big. Who knew that was possible?
Now the solution. Microsoft has tons of articles on this, but the one that describes it the best is 927396. The top bullet points explain exactly what we were seeing:
Now there are multiple ways of fixing it, it really depends on how many users are accessing your database. For us, it is very few as we only have application accounts. However, here are your options:
We went with option #2, so we have the default settings, and guess what it works! The downside is that the memory keeps increasing, but we haven’t had a performance issue. I am guessing is that the used memory space is staying consistently the same size, but it is not reclaiming memory, which is causing a memory leak. I am going to work with our DBA this next week to validate that assumption (and make sure it will reclaim the memory at some point), so I will keep this post updated based on what we found.
In addition, I am going to switch MDOP back to 0, and see if SQL isn’t quite as dumb with parallelism as we think it is now.
Since I keep forgetting to check these base performance assumptions prior to digging in, I thought I would list them here with some description. Yes, this is mostly for my personal edification, so deal with it.
I get this every once in a while, and it is quite annoying. Basically all the colors are messed up when you try to log in via RDP. Everything appears black. You can see your cursor, so you can log into machines, but it is very difficult when dialog boxes are around. I found the solution over at server intellect, and wanted to slap it here so that I have an easy place to find it.
A black Remote Desktop Login Screen when connecting to your Windows Server 2003 Server is caused by registry entries changed either through minor corruption or user error. To resolve it, replace the registry entries with the ones in the registry script below. Simply copy and paste the below script into a text file, and rename it “rdpreset.reg”. Right click on the resulting file, and select Merge.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_USERS.DEFAULTControl PanelColors]
“ActiveBorder”=“212 208 200”
“ActiveTitle”=“10 36 106”
“AppWorkSpace”=“128 128 128”
“Background”=“102 111 116”
“ButtonAlternateFace”=“181 181 181”
“ButtonDkShadow”=“64 64 64”
“ButtonFace”=“212 208 200”
“ButtonHilight”=“255 255 255”
“ButtonLight”=“212 208 200”
“ButtonShadow”=“128 128 128”
“ButtonText”=“0 0 0”
“GradientActiveTitle”=“166 202 240”
“GradientInactiveTitle”=“192 192 192”
“GrayText”=“128 128 128”
“Hilight”=“10 36 106”
“HilightText”=“255 255 255”
“HotTrackingColor”=“0 0 128”
“InactiveBorder”=“212 208 200”
“InactiveTitle”=“128 128 128”
“InactiveTitleText”=“212 208 200”
“InfoText”=“0 0 0”
“InfoWindow”=“255 255 225”
“Menu”=“212 208 200”
“MenuText”=“0 0 0”
“Scrollbar”=“212 208 200”
“TitleText”=“255 255 255”
“Window”=“255 255 255”
“WindowFrame”=“0 0 0”
“WindowText”=“0 0 0”
This will correct the colors on the login screen to Windows Server default.
As I am sure you gathered from other recent posts, we are using (read: testing) CSS for a lot of stuff. Well, we found out a beautiful new issue when creating and editing projects from the command line.
When you look at MSDN about adding a filter to a Project, you are presented with the following syntax:
/Filter “+text1.txt -*.exe -dir1 +…*.jpg”
Needless to say, that is not correct. For AddProj, they syntax has to be correct, but for EditProj, syntax is a lot more lax (the below is the syntax for EditProj). Regardless, everything in the quotes is incorrect. Instead a filter should look like the following:
Filter=+“text.txt” -”*.exe” -“dir1” +”…*.jpg”
They are either updating the MSDN article or creating a KB article about this.