Published on Monday, 18th August 2008 .
I’ve just spent a great weekend in London with the parents, doing the tourist ‘thing’ (the photo above was taken from the London Eye); In September I’m off to New York for my 30th, then in November I’m off to Paris and Egypt - I think I’ll need Christmas off to recover!!
I’m really overwhelmed with what to do when I go to New York - does anyone have any suggestions for must see attractions? I’ve already pencilled in the Empire State Building, the Statue of Libery, the Guggenheim Museum and a Broadway show (which one?!?). Any other recommendations?
Published on Tuesday, 5th August 2008 .
Yesterday we encountered a worrying blocking error when expanding the Application node under a BizTalk Group in the 2006 Administration Console:
Failed to create ApplicationNode (Microsoft.BizTalk.SnapIn.Framework)
Additional Information:
Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. (mscorlib)
Failed to enable constraints. One or more rows contain values violating non-null , unique or foreign-key constraints. (System.Data)
All of the servers in the Group were affected, this suggested to me that there was some corruption in the management database given that we had been performing a deployment of new assemblies just before it occurred.
One possible resolution to the problem - repair the BizTalk installation - was discussed on MSDN, but that didn’t appear to work in our case; Instead, restarts of all the servers in the Group (3 servers in total) resolved the problem.
Not a satisfactory resolution, but one which worked nonetheless; we’ll be keeping a close eye on the environment in future….
Published on Wednesday, 30th July 2008 .
I recently wrote about problems with two-factor authentication and installing a certificate in the correct certificate store. Well, we’ve had similar problems, this time securing the transport link on a SOAP adapter, which resulted in the following error:
Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority ‘your machine name’. The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.
After some digging, it turns out that the problem is due to an untrusted certificate issuer (Certificate Authority) for the cert we were trying to use. Adding the root certificate to the list of Trusted Root Certification Authorities resolved the issue.
Published on Wednesday, 9th July 2008 .
For those of you that still live in the wonderful world of BizTalk 2004 and use the EnlistOrch.vbs script, I noticed today that it will always use the default Host when starting, which is a bit annoying when you have set another host during binding and are scripting your deployment…..
I’ve updated the script to accept the Host you want the orchestration to use as a command-line parameter, this ensures that the orchestration will be started with the correct Host. Invoking the script now looks something like the following (note the new HostName parameter):
C:\>EnlistOrch.vbs <OrchestrationName> <Assembly> <HostName> [Action]
An updated version of the script can be downloaded here.
Published on Tuesday, 8th July 2008 .
Just a quick heads-up for those of you managing a SQL Server environment, it looks as though there is an important update for SQL Server versions 7.0, 2000 & 2005. Full details of bulletin MS08-040 are available on the Microsoft Security Bulletin Website - details are as follows (my emphasis):
This security update resolves four privately disclosed vulnerabilities. The more serious of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to run code and to take complete control of an affected system. An authenticated attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full administrative rights.
This security update is rated Important for supported releases of SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) 1.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000), Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (WMSDE), and Windows Internal Database (WYukon).
The security update addresses the vulnerabilities by modifying the way that SQL Server manages page reuse, allocating more memory for the convert function, validating on-disk files before loading them, and validating insert statements.
The hotfix will be installed automatically by Windows Update (as it has just done on my development machine); you may want to check it on a non-production environment first to ensure there are no unwanted side affects.