When trying to recover my Lumia 820 from unsuccessful OS upgrade, phone went completely dead.

I was not able to turn it on or see any sign of activity in the device (boot manager damage happened probably).

At that stage I decided to look for tool which can recover my boot manager and then OS on Lumia.

Tool I found is available on Microsoft web site:

• Windows Phone Recovery Tool – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=525569

…and here is how it recovered my phone…

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When I tried to install Technical Preview of Windows 10 on my Nokia Lumia 820, I ended up with phone which went into infinite loop of updating.

As a result of that phone became unusable and there was no way to bring it back to life without any additional intervention.

To get phone back to life I used fostware available for free from Microsoft:

• Lumia Software Recovery Tool – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=525568

…and here is how that went…

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If you need to watch IIS application pool and start it once goes down and want to use PowerShell for that here is simple script for that.

Script includes also logging all restarts in log file which is created in same folder as script.

# AppPool to monitor
$AppPoolName = "AppPoolName"

# Log Destination
$LogToScreen = 1
$LogToFile = 1

# Determine script location for PowerShell
$ScriptDir = Split-Path $script:MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path

# Output log
$OutputLogPath = $ScriptDir + "\AppPoolRestart.csv"

#Check if file exists and create if it doesn't
If(!(Test-Path -Path $OutputLogPath)){
#Create file and start logging
New-Item -Path $OutputLogPath -ItemType File
}

###
# Function: LogMessage
###
function LogMessage($Msg, $ToScreen, $ToFile)
{
if ($ToScreen -eq 1)
{
Write-Host $Message
}

If ($ToFile -eq 1)
{
Add-Content -Path $OutputLogPath -Value $Message
}
}
###
# End Function: LogMessage
###

While (1 -eq 1){

Clear-Host

$AppPoolStatus = Get-WebAppPoolState -Name $AppPoolName

$DateTime = Get-Date

If ($AppPoolStatus.Value -eq "Stopped"){
Write-Host "Not Working"
Start-WebAppPool -Name $AppPoolName
$Message = "App Pool $AppPoolName restarted at $DateTime"
LogMessage $Message $LogToScreen $LogToFile
}Else{
Write-Host "Working"
}

Sleep 5
}

SQL Server 2012 has very nice HADR technology built-in, AlwaysOn Availability Groups. It allows to have multiple replicas of selected databases across multiple servers, which can be even located across multiple sites. AlwaysOn itself provides mechanism to keep all replicas of database synchronized and up-to-date, as some of them might serve data for read-only purposes (for example reporting).

MSDN article: AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server) describes AlwaysOn technology in details. In this article I will focus on practical side of this HADR technology and how to get this up and running fast without any issues.

To test and demonstrate SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn capabilities I built simple Lab environment on VMware Workstation as shown below. Lab contains 2 servers with Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise.

In order to get SQL Server AlwaysOn up and running we will complete following activities:

• Install Failover Clustering Role
• Configure Windows Server Failover Clustering
• SQL Server installation
• Demo database preparation
• Enable Availability Groups on SQL Server
• Creating AlwaysOn Availability Group

So, let’s get started…

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Many times you think how to extract some information from memory.dmp generated by Windows once it crashes. Let’s have a look into quick process, which might be very helpful in many cases during troubleshooting unexpected BSODs on client computers.

Before we start we need tool, WinDbg, which is available on Microsoft.com. In order to download WinDbg go to WDK and WinDbg downloads on Microsoft. On that page locate section Standalone Debugging Tools for Windows (WinDbg).

Once you download and install WinDbg we are ready to start.

So, let’s see what’s in memory.dmp…

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Recently I went through requirement of running SQL scripts on multiple databases on different servers. As the list of databases was different from script to script I decided to create universal solution, which will allow to easily prepare for deployment and can be simply reused at any time.

As a platform to execute scripts I went with PowerShell as that provides flexibility in case additional functionality will be required.

Whole solution contains 3 files:

• SqlExecutionInflow.csv – file contains list of databases and servers where particular database is located. It is simple CSV file with 2 columns
• SqlExecQuery.sql – contains SQL script which will be executed against all databases listed in SqlExecutionInflow.csv
• SqlExec.ps1 – main script which load SqlExecInflow.csv and executes query from SqlExecQuery.sql

All files have to be placed in same folder. As a result script will create transcript file with output from all executed commands.

And here are example files and script itself…

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Recently I went through installation process of Bareos on openSUSE. Bareos seems to be interesting solution for backups in heterogeneous  environments.

Ok,let’s start and see how to deploy in 5 steps:

• Step 1: Add repository with Beros and Beros WebUI; Install Beros
• Step 2: Create Bareos database and Tables on MySQL
• Step 3: Configuring Bareos (few config files)
• Step 4: Starting services and accessing WebUI portal
• Step 5: Enable/Autostart Bareos services (optional)

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In case you want to deploy MediaWiki 1.25.1 with VisualEditor use following components:

• MediaWiki 1.25.1 http://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.25/mediawiki-1.25.1.tar.gz – stable
• VisualEditor REL1_25 http://extdist.wmflabs.org/dist/extensions/VisualEditor-REL1_25-c1ed854.tar.gz – stable
• UniversalLanguageSelector REL1_25 http://extdist.wmflabs.org/dist/extensions/UniversalLanguageSelector-REL1_25-7661826.tar.gz – stable

Configuration details for LocalSettings.php for these components can be found here:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector

When you download VisualEditor from Git repository installation with MediaWiki 1.25.1 is more likely to fail.

I just found vi reference from Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) 🙂 Nice piece of memorabilia as well as handy reference for vi beginners.

If you use CentOS and want to add some extra packages you can use EPEL.

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux is project created by Fedora.

In order to use repositories on CentOS first download and install RPM appropriate for your version of CentOS from here:

Method 1

http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/

• epel-release-latest-5.noarch.rpm – CentOS 5.x
• epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm – CentOS 6.x
• epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm – CentOS 7.x

Then install it and enjoy more packages from new repo.

Method 2

[root@localhost ~]# yum install epel-release

Here is example from CenOS 7 how to add EPEL repositories:

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