I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop.  Now, to me, my laptop always does feel very, very hot.  So much so, that I can't have it on my lap after about ½ hour as it is simply too hot.  I just thought that the cooling wasn't up to much, and normally laptops do get quite hot.  Then a while ago probably like other people I started seeing on the Web details about Dell batteries catching fire.  Then Dell admitted that there was a problem and started to recall the effected batteries.  I found the recall site (find it here) whilst at work and emailed it to home.

About two weeks later, I have finally got my ass going and checked the battery.  Lo and behold, my battery is one of those effected!  Must admit that it does have me a tiny bit worried, as when I do use my laptop, I usually have it on for at least a few hours.

So, I've filled in the on line form, and I now expect a new batter to be delivered.  Below, is the email confirmation that I received from Dell.

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Was helping someone install a new New site onto one of their systems earlier today.  The installation went OK, but then when they went to the Web administration console, they simply received a "Service Unavailable" message.  It was all rather confusing.  We checked the installation, and re-installed a couple times, to no effect.  We checked the file and IIS permissions, again, no effect.  I then just happened to notice that the application pool that the Web application was running had not been started.  So, started the application pool, and bob's your uncle, it all worked fine.

So, if you get a simple "Service Unavailable" message from a Web application hosted on a Windows 2003 server.  Check to see what application pool the application is running in, and make sure that it is has started.

Earlier I posted an article about using IIS Diagnostics Toolkit.  I've just remembered another tool that I have used in the past, called 'Fiddler'.

Fiddler is a tool that allows you to find out how Microsoft Internet Explorer interacts with your Web application.  It allows you to track down strange performance bottlenecks, gives you information about which cookies are being sent, what downloaded content is marked cacheable, and more.

It is an HTTP debugging proxy that logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. It enables you to inspect all HTTP traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. It is much simpler to use than NetMon or other network debuggers because it exposes only HTTP traffic and does so in a user-friendly format.

You can find out more information and download Fiddler from here.

Yesterday, I was helping a colleague with some IIS and MCMS (Microsoft Content Management Server) security issues.  Whilst we resolved the security issues relatively easily, we had trouble putting them to test on the server.  Basically, we needed an IIS box, with a private SSL certificate, in order to secure the login page.

Well, we were having a devil of a time getting HTTPS to work.  If you went to the site using basic HTTP it all worked fine.  However, as soon as you tried to go to the site using HTTPS it failed and came up with a message like "DNS error".

I eventually found this tool called IIS Diagnostics Toolkit (x86), from Microsoft which allowed us to find that the SSL Certificate we generated was invalid, and that we needed to create a new stronger certificate.

I had problems restoring a database backup from one server to another, and blogged about the problems here.

Further to this problem, I thought that I would 'finish off' the issue of restoring a database backup from one server to another.

As detailed in my previous post, I detailed how to select the backup file to restore.  Before you select OK to restore the databse, you need to also change a further couple of settings.  In Microsoft SQL Management Studio, the restore database dialog, once you have the "source for restore" selected, you should check a further few options.

Quite often when you are restoring a database from a different server, more than likely the database paths are different.  The backup file has the paths of the original source location contained within the file.  You therefore need to make sure that they map to the paths that are specific to the destination machine.  You therefore need to go to the "options" page and change these paths.

If you are restoring a database over an existing database, then it is probably also a good idea to "overwrite the existing database".  Then in the "Restore the database files as" section, change all of the paths to the destination machines database paths.

For example, if the backup file had paths of the following, I would assume that the SQL data was installed on the H drive.

H:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\<database name>.mdf

If the destination SQL server was installed on the C drive along with the data:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\<database name>.mdf

Obviously, if you do not set the correct paths, when you come to try and restore the database you will get the following style error:

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
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Restore failed for Server '<server name>'.  (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&ProdVer=9.00.1399.00&EvtSrc=Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.ExceptionTemplates.FailedOperationExceptionText&EvtID=Restore+Server&LinkId=20476

------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError: The tail of the log for the database "<database name>" has not been backed up. Use BACKUP LOG WITH NORECOVERY to backup the log if it contains work you do not want to lose. Use the WITH REPLACE or WITH STOPAT clause of the RESTORE statement to just overwrite the contents of the log. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&ProdVer=9.00.1399.00&LinkId=20476

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BUTTONS:

OK
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I've been having trouble trying to restore a SQL 2005 database.

Background

The database already exists, and I wanted to restore a backup of the 'live' database to my local machine.  So, I copied the file to my local machine.  Then opened up Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, selected the database and then Tasks > Restore > Database...

I obviously wanted to restore from a "device" (file), so I selected the "from device" radio button, and selected the "..." button to open the "Specify Backup" dialog.  Ensuring that the Backup media was set to file, I clcked on the "add" button and located the backup file.

However, the problem comes when I clicked on the OK button.  I get the following error:

The error

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
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An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Cannot open backup device '<drive>:\<path>\<backup file>.bak'. Operating system error 5(error not found).
RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 3201)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&ProdVer=09.00.1399&EvtSrc=MSSQLServer&EvtID=3201&LinkId=20476

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BUTTONS:

OK
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The resolution

In my investigations, I have found out a couple things.  Firstly, the mapping text for the error is incorrect.  It should not be "error not found", it should in fact be "access denied".  This error text is the key, and since in my instance for what ever reason it is not being mapped correctly.  This therefore lead me down the route that allowed me to resolve this problem.

As the correctly mapped error text indicated it's an access problem.  Basically, the service that SQL is running under, needs to have security rights to the backup file.  So, simply adding these rights to the backup file resolved my issue!

Conclusion

It appears to be a reasonably common problem where mapping text does not map corretly.  Therefore, if you do get an error, do not rely on the error text, but the error number.  In this case '5'.  Further more, always make sure that if SQL is accessing files from other servers, that the service account has access to those files!

Recently M$FT recently released a new beta blog authoring tool, called Windows Live Writer. (Download here).  It appears to work with loads of different blog types, such as Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, Movable Type, Live Journal, dasBlog, Blogger and more.  The real difference, is that it is all tied into your Web browsers as a toolbar add-on!  I've really been getting into some useful toolbar add-ons, as you have probably seen.

Windows Live writer is more than your usual WYSIWYG editor.  It has features that provide spell checking, but also some more interesting features such as inserting maps from Windows Live Local.

I would love to put on in here, but for what ever reason, my current blog software and Windows Live Writer cant publish images!

I'm still playing around with it, and may post some more information about it later.

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