How to perform an unattended installation of SQL Server 2008 Express

A while ago I wrote an article called “How to perform an unattended installation of SQL Server 2005 Express“. With the release of SQL Server 2008 it’s time to write another one about how to do the same but for SQL Server 2008 Express. So, let’s get started …...

Does IE8 suck?

I installed Internet Explorer 8 on my laptop at home (Vista Business x64) and my laptop at work (Windows XP Professional SP2) recently. I’ve been having a bit of a play with IE8 – in fact I have no choice at work as company policy dictates IE is the only supported browser (not an uncommon scenario). Here are a few comments I’ve got about IE8 so far …...

Cisco ACLs & Windows file shares – What ports need to be open?

I had a situation recently where I had to allow access to Windows file shares on one subnet from Linux systems that are on a different subnet. No problem except that there was a Cisco 1811 router in the way that is locked down pretty tight. Some ports needed to be open but which ones?...

SQLCMD.EXE on SQL 2008 doesn’t work – HResult 0×2, Level 16, State 1

I’ve built one of my test servers with SQL Server Express 2008 w/ Advanced Services. On a whole load of our servers I use SQL Express for local installations and SQLCMD.EXE works well as a good way to run scheduled backups. It’s done this way because SQL Express doesn’t support SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services), the component required for scheduled tasks. I wrote an article about this a...

Russian forum comment spam from 89.185.88.241 and 89.185.88.237

I checked my site’s spam queue today and found that I suddenly had 10 comments that were identified as spam by the Wordpress plugin Akismet (this sites uses the Wordpress blogging engine, the best blogging engine available in my opinion). Here are the details of the comments …...