View from dinner

At Tech*Ed in Barcelona this week and having a free night, i found this restaurant on top of the Dali museum or was it Picasso?

Anyway, this was the view!

Hurrah!

A sneaky trick – create an HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WHOS key in your registry; restart the machine; let windows update run...

It picks up an upgrade (that will not install until I shutdown and upgrade for some reason).

Power on, plug in phone HALLELUJAH!  Phone is syncing again (with a very small bit of setup work).

Wunderbar.  Now I’m more content!

Well, I made it

I’ve transitioned my production desktop to beta.  Vista RC1 (although RC2 was released this week L) and Office 12 B2TR.  It’s been an interesting ride, I chose in the end for a clean install of both after a failed install (because I left the machine in the OU that delivered Office 2003 by GPO!). 

My next challenge will be to upgrade the old XP SP2 world when I am ready.

What’s wrong right now?  Well the main crippler is it’d be nice to use my Windows Mobile 5 phone on the system – apparently the ActiveSync upgrade is still ‘dogfood only’ for MS right now.  So the old XPSP2 world has to live on for a bit.  Oh and the ISA 2004 client is running in XP mode too.

Back from the South

Over the past few weeks I've been working for a sizeable commercial bank down 'sarf'.

They’ve a computer setup that had been giving cause for concern and I was in to help them rebuild it onto new hardware.  As is usual this was interesting (in the Chinese sense!) but also rewarding, however we did get tripped up by an interesting dilemma.

The system was based in part on a an old SQL Server Cluster from which we needed the databases.  This was MSDE running on Windows 2000 Server.  The new environment is SQL 2000 running on Windows Server 2003.  The DBA's out there might know where I am going with this already… The original system was fragile and still running the original RTM version of SQL Server 2000.  The new system had to run Service Pack 3 as a minimum.  So late one day just as we went to do the restores and leave things running we hit a snag.  We could not upgrade the live system to SP3, and we could not run the new system on RTM.  We had to backup and restore the entire system including Master, MSDB, and Model databases.

So we resorted to an intermediate server - Windows Server 2000, SQL Server 2000 RTM and then restored the data, then we upgrade the server to SP3, backed it up, and restored to the new system.  A few extra hours at the end of a long day.  But a great gotcha!

The reason why - well Microsoft changed the Schema on the Master database in SQL server between RTM and SP3 and therefore the master database cannot be restored onto any machine running a different service pack.

Interesting!!