2

How-to : Recover totally bricked Nokia Lumia 820

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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:

…and here is how it recovered my phone…

(more…)

0

How-to : Recover Nokia Lumia 820 when OS fails to load

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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:

…and here is how that went…

(more…)

0

Code snippets : Restart IIS Application Pool in PowerShell

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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
}
5

How-to : Setup AlwaysOn Availability Group on SQL Server 2012

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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.

Lab environment also contains Active Directory domain and Domain Controller, which is not shown on the diagram.

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…

(more…)

1

Tips & Tricks : Analyzing Windows memory.dmp file

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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

(more…)