six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2017-04-01

Reset VSS Writers

VSS writers are application-specific components for Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service, which ensure the consistency of application data when a shadow copy is created. That's quite useful for creating consistent backups of a system. However, some of these writers go into error states more or less frequently. And Microsoft did not deem it necessary to document how to reset writers without rebooting the entire system (or at least I didn't manage to find that piece of information).

See more ...

Posted 16:19 [permalink]

2015-03-12

Repairing a Suspect msdb Database

Sometimes a situation arises where an SQL Server instance comes back up with a database tagged as "suspect". Apparently there is a number of possible causes for this, like transaction log corruption, insufficient memory or disk space, or unexpected shutdowns due to hardware or power failure. In our case the reason was probably a hardware failure, since the database resides on an iSCSI volume, and we were making changes to our iSCSI network. And to make things a little bit more interesting, our msdb database just had to be among the affected databases.

See more ...

Posted 19:07 [permalink]

2014-03-26

Lync Automation

We're using Microsoft Lync 2010 at work, and I find it quite annoying that the software keeps resetting my status to "available" when I don't want it to. So I started looking for a way to automate setting the status back to "busy".

Unfortunately the normal Lync installation doesn't seem to include a PowerShell module. There is, however, a .Net assembly included with the Lync SDK (this article describes the details). Having to install Visual Studio, SQL Server Express and the Silverlight 4 Tools seemed a little overkill to me, though.

See more ...

Posted 21:46 [permalink]