SSIS Excel Export Job Fails on SQL 64Bit

Recently I upgraded a SQL Server from SQL 2005 32-bit to SQL 2008 64-bit.  I have a handful of SSIS jobs that export and push data to different interfacing systems.

I successfully recreated all of the jobs and ran them manually and everything worked.  I setup scheduled jobs in the SQL Server Agent to run the tasks however one job that exports data to Excel would not run successfully.  I kept getting a Jet 4.0 error and the SSIS package would not write or manipulate the excel file it was supposed to export to.

Windows elevated programs can't access mapped network drives.

I recently installed an older program on a new Windows 8 system and found that when trying to open or save files to a mapped network drive the network drives didn't exist.  However when I open My Computer or Windows Explorer folders, the mapped network drives were there and functioned normally.  What gives?  It all has to do with how Windows provides (or rather limits) access to profile based resources when running with elevated privileged.

Moving User accounts to a new MS SQL DB

When upgrading and moving to a new MS SQL Server it sure is easy to move the existing accounts from the existing server to the new server.

Here is a way to do that.

Free Microsoft eBooks

A friend recently shared a blog post he found that contained quite a bit of useful information so I thought I'd share a link to it.

Large collection of Free Microsoft eBooks for you, including: SharePoint, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Office 365, Office 2010, SQL Server 2012, Azure, and more.

Increase Volume Size of vRDM disk in vSphere

Background: I have a server that has multiple volumes with a total space adding up to nearly 3TB and because of the single extent limit of 2TB for VMFS 3.x, I couldn't store all of the data in VMDKs on one volume. So I had get creative and used Virtual Raw Device Maps for the large disks and mapped them to LUNs on the iSCSI storage.

Challenge: One of the volumes recently ran low on disk space, I have capacity on the SAN; how do I increase the volume size of a vRDM. It's straight forward in a VMDK, edit settings of the VM and increase the size of the disk.

HP ProCurve firmware upgrade

HP Switches have made there way into our network. In some applications I like them. In some applications I still prefer Cisco. Regardless, there is a slightly different skill set required to administer them. I also use my tech notes as my own reference book so here is a note on doing a firmware upgrade (IOS upgrade in Cisco speak).

Microsoft Clustering MNS File Share Witness

Helpful cluster commands to manage a two node MS 2003 cluster utilizing a File Share Witness for quorum control.

Configuring a file share witness

To configure the file share witness, follow these steps:

External File Link in SharePoint 2010

I am beginning the process of upgrade from WSS 3.0 to SharePoint Foundation 2010 and trying to make sure that all content in the WSS 3.0 site will work in 2010.  The first hurdle I came to is external file and share links.  So, how does one add a link to an external file on a network share?