Intermittent Network Connectivity Failures in Windows 2012 on VMWare with VMXNET3 Driver

Over the past several weeks we’ve had issues with some servers sporadically dropping off the network and quickly regaining connection. Network connectivity was checked and tests were ran but nothing was found. One commonality among the servers is that each is running in VMWare and use the vmxnet3 driver as the main NIC driver. After reading a couple of articles about potential issues surrounding this driver we opened up perfmon to check for discarded packets and found that it was discarding them at an alarming rate.

 

After reading the following article:

Large packet loss at the guest OS level on the VMXNET3 vNIC in ESXi

we made the prescribed changes and haven’t experienced issues since.

How to keep your remote desktop session active when it's minimized

If you have an interactive application running on a machine that you have open in an RDP session and you want the app to continue to run when the RDP session is minimized you'll have to make some changes to the registry on your computer (not the remote computer).

Original blog post

The general steps are to modify the registry by doing the following:

locate the key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\

add a DWORD value in this key, naming it "RemoteDesktop_SuppressWhenMinimized", and give it the value 2.


If you're a 64-bit client, add that value to this key:HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\

SSRS Error: An item with the same key has already been added

This typically means that you have an column in your dataset query that is specified twice. For instance, SQL will let you return "Order Number" twice in a query, but if you try to use that query in SSRS, it will error with "An item with the same key has already been added".

Remove the second instance of the column or alias the column to a different name to keep the error from coming back.

Word Wrap Annotation in SSIS

I thought I would pass this on since there is no word wrap feature for annotations in SSIS. If you use CTRL+Enter inside the annotation box, SSIS will drop down to the next line to begin typing.

Getting SQL Server Error Messages to Write to the Event Log

SQL Server alerts can give you valuable insight into issues with your servers and can track a multitude of different errors, messages and events. To view all the built-in system error messages, run the following script on Master database.

SELECT *

  FROM SYS.MESSAGES

 WHERE LANGUAGE_ID = 1033

1033 is the English language ID taken from the syslanguages table

SELECT MSGLANGID

  FROM SYSLANGUAGES

 WHERE NAME = 'US_ENGLISH'

In SQL Sever 2008 there are over 8900 different messages that can be returned from the server, all with varying severities and text messages. The event I’m going to focus on here is message_id 229, “The %ls permission was denied on the object '%.*ls', database '%.*ls', schema '%.*ls'”.

SELECT * FROM SYS.MESSAGES

 WHERE LANGUAGE_ID = 1033

   and message_id = 229

Message_id	Language_id	Severity	Is_event_logged	Text
229	1033	14	0	The %ls permission was denied on the object '%.*ls', database '%.*ls', schema '%.*ls'.

If I want to be alerted any time a user tries to call a stored procedure or query a table they dont have access to, I can create a SQL Agent Alert using the following procedure and further configuring the alert to email me.

EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_alert @name=N'Insufficient Permission Error',

            @message_id=229,

            @severity=0,

            @enabled=1,

            @delay_between_responses=0,

            @include_event_description_in=1,

            @category_name=N'[Uncategorized]',

            @job_id=N'00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'

GO

After this is setup, you would expect that everytime this error is generated an email would be sent to you, but…… going back to the IS_EVENT_LOGGED column in the SYS.MESSAGES table, you see that this event is not logged and will not be sent to the Event Log.

So how do I get this error to log to the Event Log and then sent in an email? In SQL 2005 SP2+ and SQL 2008, the following command can be issued to modify the existing messages:

EXEC sp_altermessage

 @message_id = 229

,@parameter = 'WITH_LOG'

,@parameter_value = 'True'

Setting the parameter ‘With_Log’ to a value of true tells SQL that the triggering of this event will always result in the error being written to the Event Log

NOTE: If/when you decide that you no longer want to monitor this event, just disabling the alert will not be enough to keep the event from being logged to the Event Log. You must run the following script to keep it from being logged.

EXEC sp_altermessage

 @message_id = 229

,@parameter = 'WITH_LOG'

,@parameter_value = 'False'