TFS 2008 SP1, WSS3.0 SP1 and SQL Server Express 2008 on Windows 2008 – Won’t work!

• TFS 2008 SP1 will not work with SQL Express 2008 as Express does not have Agent enabled.
• You cannot upgrade from Express 2008 to the Standard 2008 as the setup program uses the shell of the installed instance. Instead you have to remove all instances (you can leave the shared tools installed) and then re-run setup from you Standard 2008 setup program
• When TFS 2008 SP1 installs it assumes that your Analysis Service is on the default sql instance – mine wasn’t. You will need this to change your TFS setup to work.
• It’s always wise to check that your client is Sql 2008 when you decide to install your server with no interface. I decided to have a light weight server and then had to upgrade my laptop as SQL Server 2005 obviously can’t connect to SQL Server 2008.
• SQL Server 2008 shared tools need SP1 of Visual Studio installed!
• You need over 3GB to install the Service Pack and that isn’t going to happen when you only have 2Gb free

What a bloody brilliant afternoon today has been!

Sql Server 2008 and Windows Server Core 2008

I have just spent a few happy days investigating Server Core and was looking forward to have a clean OS with no Internet Explorer. However I never realised that .Net would be able to be installed on this version of the Operating System. How crazy is that?!?! So you can have a nice IIS webserver running PHP, but then not run ASP.NET apps? That is ludicrous!

For more info: http://blog.namwarrizvi.com/?p=152

Backing up new Server 2008 Core – missing wbadmin

Whilst I was playing with this server, I was interested in having a baseline image of my server as I played with the new features. However everything I read said that I could use WBADMIN to run a backup. I typed it from the command line and it wasn’t there!

So whilst doing some searching about IIS I came across the solution. I saw this post about Role Management Tool.

So I ran

ocsetup WindowsServerBackup

Once the Component setup has installed it you can now use WBADMIN

wbadmin start systemstatebackup –backuptarget:e

Windows Server Core 2008: First steps - configuring for remote desktop

From a previous post you will see that I destroyed all my servers and started to learn something about Windows 2008. So now my new 2x512Mb RAM sticks have arrived for my K7N420 Pro Motherboard. Now I could load Windows 2008 on it as the minimum is 512Mb RAM for this OS. I thought let’s install the new “Server Core System”, which to be fair was extremely quick to install and had me with a log on screen quite quickly.

However, I log in, change the password (its blank as default) and then suddenly release I don’t even have a GUI. Cool I thought, I only want this server to run a DB and TFS Server. So let’s configure it.

1) Let’s give it a name, type the following in the command window

hostname

which should give you something daft like

win-egmik5j3f4m

Not exactly the best machine name, so type the following (where Simain is going to be my machine name). I always like to reboot after a name change (old habits!)

netdom renamecomputer win-egmik5j3f4m /NewName:Simian /REBoot

2) Next I check the network settings so that I can use the GUI of my laptop, so I check the settings

ipconfig /all

and notice that there are no IP addresses or no network configured at all. So next lets see what interfaces are defined.

netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces

So this tells me I have “Local Area Connection” and some Loopback pseudo interface. Make a note of the index of your interface as you will need it later

Now I assume that I need to configure the Local Area Connection as it states it is DHCP, and I wanted my server to have a static IP.

netsh interface ipv4 set address name="Local Area Connection" 

source=static address=192.168.2.2 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.2.1

After this the ‘DHCP Enabled’ setting in ipconfig /all has changed to No. So the next step is to add the DNS, for this you need the index from earlier

netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name="Local Area Connection" address=192.168.2.1 index=2

Now all I have to do is change my DHCP server to give out IP from a range of 3 onwards, so that I never get a conflict.

So, now I have a machine on the network, I want to unplug all the peripherals and connect to it via Remote Desktop (mstsc). Let’s tell the registry and the firewall to allow remote desktop connections.

cscript C:'Windows'System32'Scregedit.wsf /ar 0

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Desktop" new enable=yes

Now I can use my server like a true remote server on my network.

For further information please see here.

Windows Server Core 2008 – 3Com NIC installation problem

It appeared that my on-board NIC was not working as my new installation would not recognise it. So I took my “3C905C-TX-M Etherlink 10/100BT PCI NIC w/Management” from a server that was running Server 2003 and I knew was working. Plugged it in and it still did not recognise this one.

Now the Vista drivers are different so I tried to download some drivers on the net, I copied them onto the new server and ran the exe. Still didn’t recognise the NIC after a reboot. So I went to the extracted location of the R41104.exe and navigated to

Bare in mind that this exe tries to extract the drivers to a Dell Location. Mine is not a Dell, so I extracted them to a “Drivers” folder.

x:\Drivers\R41104\Windows\Update\Source

Then type in the following command.

pnputil –i –a W9X90XBC.INF

My network is all up and running. I might go and see if this works with the on board nForce NIC

Windows 2008 Server install problems - 0x800706F8

“Windows cannot install required files. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0x800706F8”

I originally installed Server 2008 from XP and installed it on a different partition and everything worked fine. However, I nuked the machine as I wanted to get rid of the XP Partition and I accidently lost the MBR (Master Boot Record).

So after trying to install Vista directly from the DVD. I kept getting the message above.

After a lot of research it ended up being that a Samsung SD-604 DVD has problems without the correct device drivers. However it was not listed here.

So the trick is to boot off the DVD and get to Boot Strap to recognise all your drives. Then say that you are going to repair your machine and navigate to the Command Prompt. Copy the DVD onto a folder called E:\Windows2008Setup and then install it from this command prompt.

Some other useful things I learnt were

• Boot Sector commands
• Microsoft’s instructions which only work if you have an OS in the first place

Creating a backup plan for SQL Express

Sql Server 2008 Express does not come with the built in agent that most servers do. I have a simple E-Commerce shopping cart system and I have decided to use SQL Server Express as it is free for single processor machines and I don’t need anything fancy – just a simple DB to be honest.

So here is how to have a database backup plan.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SQLExamples/Wiki/View.aspx?title=ExpressMaintenance

which was utter rubbish and his examples don’t even run!

So try this

http://www.sqldbatips.com/showarticle.asp?ID=27

Which is one stored procedure and then a Windows Task to call it every week. Prefect. Exactly what I needed. When I get a spare moment, I am going to look at this one as I want to learn PowerShell

http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3693606/Microsoft-Windows-PowerShell-and-SQL-Server-2005-SMO--Part-6.htm