by Katherine Villyard | Nov 21, 2014 | powershell, scripting
I was given the task of renaming a bunch of databases named something like “name,” “name_1,” “name_2,” etc., to “nameold,” “nameold_1,” “nameold_2,” etc. Our convention is for the database name...
by Katherine Villyard | Apr 22, 2014 | sql
Don’t you love looking at your old scripts? I’ve rewritten all of our maintenance jobs, including the jobs in task manager that handle SBSMonitoring. I’ve rid myself of Windows Internal Database, but was still using the script I wrote for it. Not...
by Katherine Villyard | Feb 16, 2014 | geekiness
I could say it’s because I’m a DBA and SysAdmin and it’s an occupational hazard, and frequently do. I could also say it’s because I’m neurotic. 😉 But it’s probably the most honest to say, “Because I once experienced a...
by Katherine Villyard | Jan 1, 2014 | sysadmin
You may recall that I’m serving up not only Windows Deployment Services capture and deploy but also Acronis recovery media over PXE. Well, now I’m also serving up Windows Defender Offline. When chosen from the PXE boot menu, it boots into Windows PE,...
by Katherine Villyard | Nov 14, 2013 | scripting
This assumes a convention where databases are named after the responsible party with an underscore and a version number or description. It also assumes that running this script is faster than remoting to the server and looking at the directory. 😉 declare @dbname...
by Katherine Villyard | Oct 20, 2013 | scripting
I needed to SFTP a bunch of files ranging in size from 40 meg to 130 gig. The default behavior of “mput *” is to copy the files in alphabetical order, but what happens then is that all the smaller files pile up behind the large ones. This is bad because...
by Katherine Villyard | Jul 9, 2013 | sysadmin
At one of my previous positions, I was in charge of the PXE server. I like PXE, so I set up a PXE server here, too. It was a lot easier at my current place of employment, because I had access to the routers and the DHCP server. It ended up being a straightforward...
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 28, 2013 | monitoring
Nagios event handlers are WHERE IT’S AT, BABY, YEAH! There are some services that I can just automagically restart without any problems. (WSUS, SQL Agent, etc.) This way, instead of notifying me, Nagios can just fix the problem for me and We Need Never Know....
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 22, 2013 | scripting
I stripped out a piece of company-specific logic, but… List the databases you want to move in a file named “control.txt.” (To migrate the entire server, paste the output of “select name from sys.databases where name not in...
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 14, 2013 | monitoring
Yeah. Twitter changed their authentication, and my old Twitter notifications (based on Ed Voncken’s work) seized up and failed. I had to update the python tweepy library to get them to work. pip install tweepy –upgrade And they’re back! I love...