THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA" : Stupid Blonde moments

Double check those IP addressses...

bradley — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:21:00 GMT

In one of my finer moments tonight.. Long story but due to a firm name change (the phone bill was still in the name of the partners from 20 years ago) we called the phone company to change the name..that's all just the name...and they had to pull a brand new DSL line. Fine, whatever, tell Exchange defender the new IP, flip the DNS on the web hoster to point to the new IP and since I use a router in front of a two nic SBS box minimal impact. So we've been noticing the Internet was dog slow. Hmmm... let's connect to the old router/connection that I still have in place because it's on a month to month contract and I haven't yet shut it off, and sure enough, the old connection was and is 6 TIMES faster than the new one. Knowing that it will take me eons to argue with the DSL company and right now it's impacting Online tax research and other litigation needs, I decide that after 8 p.m. tonight I'll flip the connection from the new IP back to the old one.

Piece of cake to go into Exchange Defender and put in the old IP and literally within minutes email is being sent as normal. Go to the web hoster control panel and put in the old IPs. So I'm sitting there and after the alloted time for the DNS records to kick in, I test the external connection and nada, nothing. That's weird, this process should be painless as all I'm flipping are the external records. So I'm doing www.dnsstuff.com testing and everything is resolving and pinging but still I get a 'web page not found'. So finally I give up, drive home thinking that I'm not giving it enough time. So at home I'm trying it again and nothing. So finally I try to connect to the site via a http:// rather than https:// even though the server has port 80 blocked. And that's when I see the obvious:

Uh... what "Linksys SPA" have I set up my A record to resolve to? That's certainly not my external router that I'm hitting there. Exactly what do I have that DNS control panel set up to redirect to? And this is where stupido me make the mistake of putting in 64.6x.xx.xxx rather than the 66.6x.xx.xxx at the "@" record but proceeded to put the RIGHT IP in at the www record. So I've been fiddling with IIS and rechecking ISA when all this time it's because I had a 64 rather than a 66 in the DNS control panel.

The moral of this story is double check your numbers.

Don't let Susan do a Live meeting invite to a listserve

bradley — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:38:00 GMT

Don't invite a listserve address to a Live meeting.

Don't invite the WRONG listserve address to a Live meeting.

Both things Susan just did.

To all on the SMBTN listserve who will now be suffering from the "ACCEPTED", "TENTATIVE" and "DECLINED" that will bounce through the listserve.... I am deeply sorry about that.

(Filed under Stupid Blonde moments)

And now for something really off the wall...

bradley — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 02:23:00 GMT

http://jds.fass.org/cgi/content/abstract/89/e_suppl_1/E15

Why is it that Lactose free milk products have a HUGE shelf life compared to their "normal" milk products?

Why is that? I've wondered why and recently that came up at the office and no one knew the answer. No that isn't a water cooler topic around the office, we actually had a case involving a Dairy and the lunch time conversation that started regarding the case sort of went off into a tangent about why Lactose free milk has a much longer "Milk must be sold by" date than normal milk.

No one knew the answer why... is it in the Lactose free processing part?

Discuss amongst yourselves.... let me know if you determine why. (or you can argue the merits of Paris Hilton's jail term...whatever strikes your fancy tonight if reruns on TV aren't enough entertainment for you)

Things Susan learned while blowing up her server on a Friday night

bradley — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 04:05:00 GMT

First off... just to let everyone know that one can change themes on a Sharepoint that's backended by SQL 2005 as is evidenced by this view: http://www.sbslinks.com/shareview.htm. There was a question in the newsgroup that pointed to a old blog post where someone said you couldn't. As you can see from there.. I can.

But you have to hear the rest of the story of how I spent my Friday night....and here's how NOT to party ..

Okay so first off just a reminder that you need to review the documentation on the web for upgrading SQL 2000 to 2005... http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/0/8/40860507-c351-4308-a876-e1b83ee4e77a/sqlinstallsteps.htm and in particular pay attention to the section that tells you to review this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918767/

When you are reading that article...make sure the thoughts that go through your brain are not 'just' that WSUS will stop functioning.. which .. hey it's not a Patching night anyway...who cares... but that when you are running ISA Server 2004 with a msde database that it will stop to function....and not only that ...that it will see the failure in logging as not a good thing and go into server lockdown mode.

Uh huh... you can see it coming can't you? The Blonde moment dead ahead.

Oh but wait... you gotta here what else I did.... oh it gets better...

You see.. earlier in the day I had gone into the server room (the one with the lock and the deadbolt you know) and had gotten the cdroms out from the room and taken them back to my office to read the readmes like a good little geek should so Marina would have been proud of me...and I left my office keys in the server room.

So..... 5 p.m comes and the folks at the office pack up ...and our dutiful secretary does exactly what she has been told to do religiously every night is to lock the server room door (oh yeah... you see what's coming next... don't you? The truly blonde moment of the evening)

So... I'm in my office about an hour later when I start uninstalling SQL 2000 and I stupidly forgot to flip the ISA to a flat file logging before uninstalling SQL 2000 as the migration instructions don't really wack me upside the face that once I mess up msde for WSUS..... it's also going to mess up ISA. So there I am uninstalling SQL 2000 and I go to confirm that WSUS doesn't work as the instructions say. Which it doesn't as I expected. All of a suddent my IM shuts down (I'm doing this via a TS session at my desktop ...not in the server room) and all of a sudden the brain kicks in and I realize that ISA has just gone into lockdown mode... so not only is the Internet dead...but I've just lost TS access to the box. Rats. No problem.. It's just ISA not being able to connect to the database... I'll just go to the server room and log in physically to the server and flip the database to file and I'll be back and running again...as soon as I find my office keys which are.......

.....uh.... they are..... uh...

..... oh yeah....

......locked in the server room.... uh huh.... yeah.

So fortunately I have Outlook in cached mode ... oh yeah because the network is like dead... to look up a fellow office mate in Outlook to come back...unlock the server room so I can get my office/car keys.

Okay so one set of office keys later... we are in the server, logged into the physical box which of course is just chugging along happy as a clam and we flip the logging databases of ISA to file and restart the Firewall service which of course stopped.

One delayed migration/upgrade later... we have a Sharepoint who's now backended on SQL 2005 workgroup...

(make sure you read the follow up exact "how to")