Well i got what i wanted last week! I`m now working on the SQL 2005 roll out in my firm and i suspect at the end of it i`ll have a few grey hairs.
Its a small project at the moment with just 3 technical specialists (yes i`m one of them) and a small number of other available "resources" to work on the third party apps side. I`m sure however it will grow as we approach deployment which will be to around 50 servers in 25 countries which are our mission critical servers. Our other servers will be done in another phase.
So why blog about it? Well i`m responsible for the "Operational" side and have to make SQL 2005 work for the Operations department, deal with disaster recovery, installations, high availability and so on. So here i am to share my experiences as i work my way through.
Day 1Finally! The test server arrived and we have the SQL 2005 installation disks! Its a good feeling and i think its time to get some easy wins out the way. So i proceed to doing a standard install where i will capture all the screen shots, put them into our install manual for the Ops department and add any required wording. (An automated setup is also on the list).
Having worked through the install wizard its now dealing with copying the files and i decide to leave it working and grab some lunch. I get back 20 minutes later (enthusiasm is an appetite killer :D) and find that the install appears to be hanging setting the security on the files. Surely not! So i killed another 10 minutes and its going no where fast and the setup log is not telling me much.
So welcome to my first "feature", a bit of swearing later and the problem is identified. Basically the server is logged on with a local admin account and i've configured the services with domain accounts. It appears that SQL 2005 is trying to do a lookup for the domain account for each file and encountering a problem (i`ll get the exact details for another post). Solution? I pulled the network cable and suddenly the installation went ahead at full steam again! I did the install again later logged on as a domain user and the problem did not occur this time so it was definately down to the local user being logged on in my case.
So, feature added to documentation and mental note to self that its not going to be perfect!
Thats its for now! The only other thing i`m doing today is getting some more books ordered. Time to get up to speed quickly.....