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SQL Server 2008: Day 5
By farseeker | August 15, 2008
Sit. Rep.: It’s all fucked. I’ve been doing all this testing on my local machine, which has been brilliant. We were then going to do some side-by-side scenario testing live, which meant prepping the servers.We don’t run th management console on the actual database server, obviously, so it gets installed on the terminal server so we can access it externally (all our servers are in a remote data warehouse). SQL goes through its setup and installs the pre-reqs, one of which is .NET Framework 3.5.
Now, on our terminal server we use a product called ThinPrint (or .Print to some). It’s a precarious piece of software, but after initial teething we haven’t had any major problems with it for a while. Until today. Everything stopped printing. It came up with obscure error messages and would crash the host application. As it turns out, the version we have is not compatible with .Net => 3.0. We followed the workaround to the letter, with no luck. We removed .NET and followed the workaround, no luck (meanwhile having to restart a busy terminal server several times during the day doesn’t make you many friends). Our head sysadmin who looks after the servers (who gave us permission to install the software, but “at our own risk”) is off-site, so at the moment nobody can print and we’ve had to siphon a bunch of users onto one of our other terminal servers, which is now, under twice its normal load, running with 8mb of free memory.
So, after all that, did we even get the console installed? No. Why? Because we’re not running 2003 SP2. Why aren’t we running SP2? Because that screws up ThinPrint. Well done.
In other news, I picked up a shiny 16gb iPhone last night (yay for late night shopping). I guess I shall be giving you my opinions on this piece of expensive bling later.
Topics: General | 2 Comments »
August 16th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
And now we see some of the ‘issues’ with production systems.
Microsoft software is fairly flawless when it comes to running side-by-side with its own species, but throw a different critter in there (.Print, in this case) and the poor little critter gets gobbled up by the beast that is SQL…
It’s a sad reality.
On the other hand, it’s not Microsofts fault that .Print isn’t compatible with .net 3.0+.
So many factors to consider.
August 18th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Oh, I know it’s not SQLs fault, its all .NET and my own fault, but tha doesn’t change the fact that its all broked!