Category Archives: Sys Admin

Server Monitoring using Powershell and DbaTools

script it…walk away.

I’m sure by now most of you have discovered dbatools, a wonderful library of PowerShell functions that make life as a  DBA so much better.   It’s a fantastic community full of people willing to help with minimal flaming and the library itself is frequently updated.

Initially I wanted to jump on the contribution train but IRL I have jobs to consider so instaed I took more of a end user role, working on familiarizing myself  with PowerShell in order to tap into the power of dbatools.  After writing some DBA specific utilities I started looking at the bigger picture of what I could do across the infrastructure with PowerShell.

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Automated Restore Fun (ARF)

script it…walk away.

Over the last a couple of weeks I started reviewing an automated restore solution I had been playing around with for a couple years.  RedGate SQL Backup had thrown some errors and since we couldn’t go without backups while waiting on RedGate support we decided to move ALL backup operations to Ola Hallengren’s scripts.  We also decided to ditch RedGate because they sent us back a list of reported bugs we had submitted and told us they aren’t going to fix it. So in other words “despite the fact that you have multiple licenses of multiple softwares across many servers, we feel your issues as a customer aren’t important to us as a software company.” With that we decided to roll our own solutions that we can customize for our environment…

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Process Count Automation

script it…walk away.

Reviewing my most recent posts, I realized that I begin my posts with “So…”.

So…, I’d like to try and stop that.

Where have I been since August 11th 2015? Apparently not being active in the SQL community where clearly I wasn’t missed :D. Really though, I ended up taking on quite a bit of side work. When I wasn’t moonlighting or spending time with my family, I devoted whatever free time that I had towards creating music and learning synthesis.

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I’m the O-D-B-c as you can see

win by decapitation…

So I’ve been working on a project to bring monitoring awesomeness to various SQL servers, without purchasing more RedGate SQL Monitor licenses and hopefully, without purchasing anything at all. Part of this project requires ODBC connections (at least it has in the testing so far), and during the testing I ran into a snag with the ODBC driver so I thought I would throw up a post in case anyone else runs into the same problem.

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Cassandra Install Helper Script

script it…walk away.

So while I’ve been doing research into the use of NoSQL platforms to augment or improve our infrastructure, I’ve had to create many…MANY Cassandra clusters. These are all testing and dev level clusters but regardless of their deployment level, the act can become very tedious. Because I’m a firm believer in repeatable builds I put together this helper script.

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“user” is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

31_Reaver

The best defense is a strong CHAINSAW SWORD!!!

Reported to the nub police…

On ubuntu 11.04 only the default user (created at installation) is put in the admin group.  This may make it hard for other users to sudo

usermod -a -G admin “username” or simply edit /etc/group and append the username to the admin group.

Make sure your user logs out and back in for the changes to take effect

Blocking IP Addresses – Windows Server 2003

31_Reaver

The best defense is a strong CHAINSAW SWORD!!!

First off…I wouldn’t recommend having a sql server that is accessible from the outside world.

In my case though I have a development server that I run from a partners network. Somewhere down the line some one or “some many” have run a scan and found this out. So my logs are filling up with password attempts.

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