Locating Orchestrator Runbooks using bad credentials

A problem recently encountered was causing major headaches. There was a runbook somewhere in the system that had an action running with the security credentials of a user that had left sometime ago. Their account had recently been disabled and the Orchestrator was logging thousands of errors and causing the Orchestrator database to grow at a massive rate. OBJECTINSTANCEDATA was growing at thousands of rows a second and hit 50 million rows and 16GB in size after only a few days.

SQL Data Compression and Configuration Manager = BAD

First off just to clarify, I am not a SQL guru, so on this topic I “know of” the feature but don’t really know that much about it.

We recently experienced a problem building a new Primary Site where the database replication links to the CAS failed and nothing we tried could fix the links. We resorted to completely uninstalling the site, deleting the Primary database and rebuilding the entire server OS from scratch. No matter what, the links replication just would not work.

RCMCTRL.LOG – Lot’s of these types of errors
Error: Replication group “Hardware_Inventory_4” has failed to initialize for subscribing site H01, setting link state to Error.

Error: Exception message: [ALTER TABLE SWITCH statement failed. Source and target partitions have different values for the DATA_COMPRESSION option.]

As it turns out, the SQL DBA’s had enabled a wonderful new feature in SQL2012 called Data Compression. In SQL land it probably makes sense and does wonderful things, but in ConfigMgr world it’s BAD.

Installing PHPBB forums on Windows Server 2012 and SQL 2012

My Adventures with PHPBB running on an all Microsoft platform began many years ago. Much trial and error resulted in the first forums with V2. When they released V3 there was a much improved situation with documentation and guides, but it was still a tough thing to get right. It’s a community that favours Linux/Apache/MySQL, so getting assistance for Windows/IIS/MSSQL is pretty tough.

This time around I’m starting a completely fresh install on Windows Server 2012, with IIS 8, and MSSQL 2012. I’ve been “upgrading” over the years and have completely forgotten all the tweaks I needed to make it work, so that as well as dealing with any new “features” of the latest MS software is why I’m writing this entry.