Restarting the VMware ESX Management service
There are times when an ESX server will need the Management Service restarted. Usually this is when the ESX host is grayed out and the guest machines are “disconnected”.
To restart the service, log onto the console and execute the following:
# service mgmt-vmware stop
# service mgmt-vmware start (can take up to 1 minute before fully online)
OR
# service mgmt-vmware restart
In order to successfully run these commands they will have to be executed as root (or using sudo)
IE 8 broke my ASP.Net Menu
Last night I upgraded to Internet Explorer 8, thinking that I wanted to be on the “latest and greatest” version of IE. I should have known better.
About 10 minutes before a customer demo of a project I have been working on for a while now, I realize that it has broken my ASP.net AJAX Controls menu. I didn’t want to but I had to reschedule the meeting. After a little bit of tinkering and searching, I found a solution to the problem. Insert a meta tag to force the browser to emulate IE7. To do so, use the following in our code:
1: <head>
2: <!-- Use IE7 mode -->
3: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
4: <title>My Web Page</title>
5: </head>
I haven’t found any good explanation of why this happens other that the usual “standards based “ browser stuff.
If you can explain it.. Leave a comment below.
SQL 2008.. Compress them backups
For those SQL admins who have managed their SQL backups using SQL dumps have had to wrestle with file sizes for many years. There are better ways of backing your databases up using things like SQL connectors to a backup software like CommVault or other backup programs but many times you just need a SQL Dump file. Depending on the size of the data in the Database they can be quite large.
The good news is that there is lot of empty space in those files and they compress very well. But the bad news to go with that is if they are larger files you will find yourself having issues with programs like WinZIP.
With SQL 2008 this is no longer an issue because it will perform compression natively during the creation of the SQL dump file. To compress the backup use the following command syntax:
BACKUP DATABASE <database name> TO <backup Device> WITH COMPRESSION
To take that to the next level and set compression on by default for all database dumps execute the following commands:
EXEC sp_configure ’show advanced options’,1
RECONFIGURE
ESEC sp_configure ‘backup compression default’,1
RECONFIGURE
So no more large SQL dump files. As if you needed another reason to upgrade your SQL Servers.
