Not the world’s most informative error message, but something to search for on Google nonetheless. Unfortunately in this instance the collective . . . → Read More: Could not find the Database Engine startup handle]]> Today I tripped over an annoying issue when attempting to install a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 instance. About 30% of the way through the installation an error was thrown up:

Could not find the Database Engine startup handle

Not the world’s most informative error message, but something to search for on Google nonetheless. Unfortunately in this instance the collective wisdom of the internet was for the most part wrong, misguided or just plain unhelpful.

So what was actually the problem? And how did I fix it (because fix it I did)?

Well during this past weekend I decided to give Microsoft Virtual PC a test drive. I’ve long been a fan of the free VMWare Server, but having heard recently it was to be discontinued I thought it time to consider the alternatives. So I ran up a virtual machine, installed the operating system, waited for hours while it completed the seemingly endless series of Windows updates and reboots required to bring the virtual machine up to date, before finally I was ready to install SQL Server 2008 R2.

I pointed the virtual machine DVD drive to the installation media ISO I had downloaded ages ago off MSDN. It opened the file with no apparent drama, and after clicking on Setup.exe the installation process proceeded as per usual. As mentioned above it got part the way through before raising an error I hadn’t seen before,  “Could not find the Database Engine startup handle”.

At this point I should explain that I’ve successfully installed instances from this copy of the installation media without issue.

After much trial and error, following bum steers and red herrings off offered by many a self appointed “expert” on various technology forums, I got to the bottom of the problem.

Turns out Microsoft Virtual PC has trouble reading ISO files properly. Burn the file to a real live physical DVD and the install works. Extract the contents of the ISO to a file folder, then run the install from there and the install works. However run it from the ISO like I have successfully done with VMWare server and it crashes and burns.

The moral of the story? Virtual PC is actually pretty good, probably a tighter integration with the host operating system than VMWare Server offered. Also you tend to get what you pay for, so take what you read on techie blogs and forums with a large dose of caution.

The uninstall was uneventful, no error messages or issues were reported by the SQL installation program.

After the uninstall was . . . → Read More: A connection cannot be made to redirector]]> Recently I uninstalled an instance of Analysis Services from a server running SQL Server 2008 R2. It was a development server hosting Reporting Services, a couple of instances of SQL Server, and a couple of named instances of Analysis Services.

The uninstall was uneventful, no error messages or issues were reported by the SQL installation program.

After the uninstall was complete I rebooted the box. Then I tested the connectity:

• Connect to SQL Server instances. Check
• Connect to Reporting Services. Check
• Connect to the remaining named Analysis Services instance… Fail!

At that point my day took a turn for the worse. When I attempted the connection in Management Studio I got an error stating:

A Connection Cannot be made to redirector.Ensure that 'SQL BROWSER' Service is running

No Connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:2382

I had been attempting to connect remotely from my desktop so I thought I’d have a go logging on to the server and connecting locally, just in case the remote connection property had been switched off somehow. No joy.

I checked that the Analysis Services and SQL Browser services were both up and running. They were.

Out of ideas of my own I turned to Google. It appeared this was a relatively common problem, with people complaining about it on every version since SQL Server 2005. Unfortunately while there was a lot of whinging about the issue nobody seemed to have understood or actually solved it.

The error message mentioned ports so I checked the firewall configuration to ensure that port was still configured to allow connections through. It was.

The common work around people seemed to come up with was change the account that the Analysis Services and SQL Browser services are running as so they use the inbuilt Local System account. Not exactly a solution, the instance could be connected under the existing service account prior to the uninstall after all so this looked like a coincidence rather than a fix of the problem. Plus the SQL Browser service was already running as Local System.

I checked the ini file that SQL Browser uses for port mappings and everything was consistent with the equivalent file on a different server were the connectivity was working correctly.

I didn’t really want to uninstall, reinstall, and reconfigure the instance I could no longer connect to. So next I tried running the Repair option in the SQL Configuration Manager over the shared components which includes SQL Browser. No luck.

Finally I ran the Repair over the Analysis Services instance I couldn’t connect to. There was no logical reason for this, I hadn’t changed anything on that instance so it should all still be configured and functioning as it had been prior to my uninstall.

The Repair exercise reported back after 10 minutes that everything was fine and it didn’t output anything that indicated it had changed any configuration settings. However when I attempted to connect to the remaining named Analysis Services instance it succeeded. At which point I did the victory dance and decided to write up my misadventure here in case I ever run into the problem again and by then can’t remember what I did to remedy it.

What . . . → Read More: iPod Nano flashing red and green]]> Recently I jumped on the treadmill at the gym, all set for a run down the road to nowhere. I went to switch on my iPod Nano only to discover it wouldn’t play any music. At first I thought it was just a flat battery, but after a couple of hours charging it still wouldn’t work.

What it was doing was flashing the LED light in an alternating green and red pattern. Very festive given the season, but pretty unhelpful when you consider that in the gym that day they seemed to be having a Phil Collins lovefest on the inhouse entertainment system.

Doing a bit of research on the internet turned up a bunch of forums and message boards which had the consensus view that (a) the problem was somewhat common, and (b) the iPod was now toast.

One thing I noticed when I’d plugged it in to charge is that the device still showed up in iTunes even though it wouldn’t play any music. This got me curious.

To start with I restored iPod to the factory defaults by clicking the Restore button in iTunes. All my music was removed from the device. It still gave me the flashing green and red light treatment, and when I copied a song onto the device it still would not play.

Even though iTunes could see it, the iPod didn’t show up under Windows Explorer. A bit more research turned up a check box on the Settings screen in iTunes to enable disk usage, which is Apple-speak for make the device visible to Windows Explorer.

iPod Nano - enable disk usage

Once done the iPod Nano showed up as a drive letter under Windows Explorer. Right clicking on the drive letter produced the context menu shown below. I chose Format to reformat the drive.

Select format from the Windows Explorer context menu

This brings up a dialog box where I could specify the details of the reformat operation. To work the iPod needs to be formatted using FAT-32. I opted for a Quick Format and clicked the Start button.

Quick format using FAT-32

After a little while the format completed. The drive letter was still visible under Windows Explorer, and under iTunes so on the face of it not much had changed.

However this time when I copied music across to the device gave me a solid green LED light, and more importantly music played!

(1) Go into iTunes, navigate to the music library, and pick the song you . . . → Read More: How to make a ringtone in iTunes]]> The out of the box ringtones on an iphone are pretty unimaginative. This is an easy problem to solve however as iTunes has a feature that makes it easy to turn a segment of a song into a ringtone.

(1) Go into iTunes, navigate to the music library, and pick the song you want to use as the ringtone.

(2) Right click on the song and choose Get Info.

(3) In the window that opens up click on the Options tab.

(4) Define the beginning and end positions of the music sample you want to turn into a ring tone by entering the Start Time and Stop Time positions as shown below. Click OK to close the window.

(5) Now right click on the song again, this time choose Create AAC version. A second copy of the song will appear in your iTunes music library, this one only containing the sample you selected when you supplied the start and end times.

Create AAC version of song

(6) Open up a Windows Explorer window and navigate to the file system location of your iTunes music library. It will be located somewhere like C:\Users\[your windows user name]\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

(7) Change the file extension of the copy you just created from .m4a to .m4r.

(8) Go back into iTunes and choose the File menu, Add File To Library item.

(9) Browse to the location of your iTunes music library where you changed the file extension earlier, and select the file with the .m4r extension you just renamed. Then click Open.

(10) The ringtone will have been added to the Ringtones library in your iTunes.

(11) Now for a bit of housekeeping. Go back into your iTunes music library folder again and delete the entry for the copy of the song you made earlier, as it no longer points to anything since you changed the file extension to be a ringtone.

(12) Sync the iphone with iTunes to copy the ringtone across to the phone.

(13) On the iphone go into Settings, Sounds, Ringtoneand browse for your newly created customised ringtone.

That’s all there is to it. The hardest part is choosing the right song to sample.

It does this by changing the colour of the notification bar in the SQL Server Management Console, which can be a life saver if you have numerous SQL Server instances that you . . . → Read More: Colour coded SQL Server 2008 sessions]]>

By default all connections look the same.

The implementation isn’t fool proof, it only works if you create a new query from the Registered Servers menu rather than clicking the New Query button. Hopefully Microsoft will get this right with a future patch or release, but for it now it relies on the user to retrain themselves to create query sessions via a right click on the Registered Servers pane.

To set up the colour coding follow these steps:

(1) From the View menu choose the Registered Servers item. A new window pane should appear on the left of the Management Console window.

(2) Register the details of the instance you are wanting to connect to by right clicking on the folder you want to include the server registration under, e.g. Local Server Groups, and choose New Server Registration.

(2a) Alternatively if you’re wanting to modify the registration of an already registered instance right click on the registered instance name instead and then choose Properties.

(3) Enter the details of the instance to be registered in the General tab.

(4) Click on the Connection Properties tab and tick the Use custom color box. Push the Select button to choose the colour you wish the notification bar to be colour coded with. Choose the colour and click OK.

Choose custom colour for notification bar alerts

(5) Click Save to persist the instance registration.

(6) Now right click on the newly registered instance and choose New Query. The query session that opens up in the right hand pane of the window should display the notification bar coloured with the shade you selected during the registration process.

Colour coded notification bar.

Once you have retrained yourself to use the Registered Servers pane to launch new query sessions you will have no excuse for accidentally running code in a production environment!

(1) Click on the Start menu, then click Server Manager.

(2) In the left pane of the Server Manager window click on the Features item.

(3) . . . → Read More: Desktop themes on Windows Server 2008]]> The default interface of Windows Server 2008 is a tad plain. There is a built in option to spruce it up a little, giving it the Vista Aero treatment.

To do this perform the following actions:

(1) Click on the Start menu, then click Server Manager.

(2) In the left pane of the Server Manager window click on the Features item.

(3) In the right window pane click on the Add Features menu item.

Click Add Features from the Server Manager window.

(4) In the Add Features Wizard dialog that appears tick the Desktop Experience box and click Next. 

Tick the Desktop Experience option.

(5) Click the Install button on the next screen that appears, then go get a drink and stretch your legs, the feature takes an eternity to finish installing. Click Close when it is complete.

(6) When the installation finishes you’ll need to reboot the machine. After the reboot the Server Manager Features screen will show the Desktop Themes feature as having being installed.

Desktop Themes shows as an installed Feature.

(7) Once the server has restarted click on the Start menu, Administrative Tools, Services item.

(8) Scroll down to find the Themes service. It will probably not be running and require a manual start.

The Themes service needs to be running.

(9) Right click on the Themes service and choose Properties from the pop up menu.

(10) Change to the Startup type to Automatic, click the Start button to initiate the service now, and then click OK to make the changes permanent.

Start the Themes service automatically each time the server boots up.

(11) Now right click somewhere on the desktop background and choose Personalize from the pop up menu. From the screen that opens up click on the Theme item.

Choose Themes from the Personalization screen.

(12) Select Windows Vista from the Theme drop down, and then click OK.

That’s all there is to it, after a few seconds the windows theme will change and you will be basking in the Aero themed user interface.

The new theme has been applied.