Son of Friday the 13th

I had the third worst day of my IT career yesterday, and it wasn't even anything I had done, knew about or was even expecting.

I suppose the 2 or 3 things I learned from the experience and that is at the end of the day what it is all about are as follows;

1. Never ever trust the trustworthy - A KVM, brand new and out of the box, worked fine on another 3 connected machines caused a new server to hang on boot-up, it never got past the black Server 2003 splash screen.

2. SQL ain't easy - The server in question was hosting a VM machine with SQL on it, all set, configured, patched and ready. It was a temporary fix while their new funky DL580 comes in. Of course with the host machine hanging, SQL had to be installed onto a new machine, one of the other servers on site.

3. When all else around you goes to pants Exchange wants to join in - Exchange always the trustworthy, was obviously feeling left out from all of the attention the new server was getting so it decided to throw a few wobblies.

I suppose the important things again are the lessons learned and what I can take from it and carry forward so here are some of them

Recovering deleted emails from Outlook;

The obvious way, click on deleted items, click on tools, recover deleted items.

A second way, exmerge out the mailbox and import the pst file to another, possibly administrator account and try the following
locate the pst in an easy accessible location
From the command line type the following lines, it corrupts the pst enough for scanpst to run on it

DEBUG C:\fullpath_to_pst\OutlookFile.PST
- f 107 113 20
- q

then find scanpst.exe, it can be in a few places,
Office 2003 it will be in \program files\microsoft\office 12\scanpst
Office 2000 \Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033

I was told on lots of occasions not to use SA authentication is SQL as its an easy attack, SQL programmers don't use decent passwords. So I installed SQL using windows authentication thinking I was doing good. I generated a new SQLAdmin account and gave it all the permissions I though it would need, knowing I could remove any necessary permissions etc ( I made it an administrator, domain admin etc). But no a SA account was needed and yes they don't really use strong passwords do they.

So to change Authentication mode on a SQL 2005 back to mixed mode and using the SA account follow this helpful article from Microsoft.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188670.aspx

And now for a whole new day of new problems.

Ain't google spell checking great!