Boris Hristov

Yes. Just more. Don’t know how much more, but … MORE!

Someone will now recommend: “Hey, Boris, read some books on Time management.” You know what – I have already done that! Even “worse” –
I use some of the methodologies(called them techniques if you want) which are discussed in these books and you have no idea… no idea… how good I manage and use my time and how much I think about doing more with less.

I just want more.

I just want to do so many things.

End.

Some days ago, we received an incident about failed restore job which includes quite a lot of steps in it. When we checked why it’s exactly failing, it just says – Unable to open Step output file. Now, that’s interesting!

One of the steps is logging it’s progress in an output .log file which resides on one of the drives on the server.

When we checked the file and tried to opened it:

And for sure, the .log file was already more than 2GB in size, so no wonder we will have some problems writing in it again, or let’s think for the issue this way – when notepad cannot open a text file, let’s do not expect that SQL Server will!

So, as you can see from the screenshot above, we renamed the problematic .log file to nameofthefile_old and created a new one with the name that was used in the restore job(please, do not ask why robocopy is used! 🙂 ) and reran the job. You won’t believe, but it completed successfully! 🙂

So, next time, if you get this error – first check the size of your output file. Probably, it got bigger with the time especially when the append option is used.

Isn’t it fun to investigate SSPI errors? Really? There’s something magical in the fact that someone is trying to connect to the SQL Server, but can’t (especially if this is the app account)

Last night, I and a colleague of mine faced continuously generating SSPI handshake errors on a server with whole a lot mirrored databases (and yes, it was filling up the error log like you won’t believe). The IP address, where the issue was coming from was, oh do you believe it, the server used to “hold” the mirrored DBs. So, at the moment I saw the errors flying into the error log I was saying to myself: “After some seconds the mirroring will fail”. However, it didn’t and when I checked the Database Mirroring monitor, everything was looking just fine. After some investigation, we didn’t find a proper reason why this error was continuing to log in to the Error log. We found in the Application log the user who was trying to connect and the reason was “Unknown user name or bad password”. We checked in the Active Directory, but everything was looking fine for his account. Sometime later, my colleague suggested: “Let’s check who is logged on the server where the SSPI’s are coming from”. So, guess how surprised we were to see the exact same.
user, logged on to the server where the SSPIs were coming from, but staying in Disconnected state in the Task Manager. We immediately logged him off and, heaven, no more SSPIs were generated.

Now, that’s all OK, but later that night, I found the user who was on the server, obviously causing us headache and start to chat with him. I was curious about what he was doing at the time the issues arouse and so, started to ask questions. It turned out that he was trying to run a VBA script, which was moving data from the server where the mirrored databases were residing to the one where the principals were and the script was using an account user name and password as parameters as part of the script(probably domain one). However, he confessed that he was missing to enter the password parameter and so the script was trying to execute and login to the destination server with blank password (empty string). Oh, did I forget to tell you that he was continuously hitting F5 because at first he was not able to understand why the script was not working (that explains the massive amount of SSPI records)?

So, let’s not blame the DEV guy, shall we…

… changed my mind – we need to blame him.

End.

Mixing house music.

As a matter of fact, I love house music. I simply love it.

What’smore, I find it magical when I am watching the best DJs in the world mixing. Many times at a party, I am just staring, not doing anything else. Just watching how the DJ behind the pult creates the whole experience. How he feels the music. How deeply in his mind he knows what’s about to come next. This just freaks me out (in a good way) and gives me so much energy and inspiration… DAMN!

One more thing to know about me – I do fall, from time to time, into, as I call it, music crisis! This is a state, which I can fall into because of an amazing track (I listen so much music, you won’t believe it…) and in which I am highly creative. So, next time you see a blog post, tweet or a Facebook update stating “crisissss” or “music crisisss”, or similar – please, just ignore me and know that I can hardly control myself at that moment…

Finally, I suggest you see the video below. It’s from the party of Laidback Luke at Yalta Club, Sofia, which was absolutely, hands down, the best party I have ever been.

P.S. I will buy a DJ pult sooner or later…