Managed Service Accounts (MSA) are intended to run as a service and not to be used by an end user to logon interactively; however, there are some cases where it is necessary for troubleshooting. From the Start Menu, if you right click on the PowerShell icon, select More and then click on “Run as a different user”, it will pop up a credential box. Enter in the gMSA account name and click OK. You will immediately get an error. This is because Active Directly manages the account for you, so we have no way of knowing what the password is...
Continue reading...Internals
Is There a Limit to msDS-AllowedToDelegateTo
For those of you that need to setup Kerberos constrained delegation for Group Managed Service Accounts, you will likely get more familiar with msDS-AllowedToDelegateTo. This attribute stores a list of SPNs that are used to configure a service so that it can obtain tickets used for constrained delegation. In my previous post on setting up Kerberos constrained delegation, I walked you through how we used it to overcome the authenticaiton double hop issue. In that example, we needed to define which SQL Servers the PowerBI Report Server was able to delegate permisisons to. The command below demonstrates how we did...
Continue reading...Database Restore Fails with Msg 3154
Have you ever tried to restore over an existing database only to receive the following error message? Msg 3154, Level 16, State 4, Line 1 The backup set holds a backup of a database other than the existing ‘AdventureWorks2012’ database. Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally. We could easily avoid this error by using the WITH REPLACE option in the RESTORE DATABASE command, but we want to know why this error occurs and how SQL Server knows they are not from the same family. The answer is the database_guid. The database_guid is a...
Continue reading...Use Trace Flag 902 to Recover from a Cumulative Update Failure
Recently, I ran into a critical error while I was helping a customer troubleshoot an issue in SQL Server. That may not sound like a big deal, but we were installing Cumulative Update 6 for SQL Server 2012 SP2 to fix our initial problem when we encountered the following error. What gives SQL Server? We just upgraded several other instances on this same server. Why does this one have to fail right now? Well, a quick peak in the errorlog sure points me in the right direction. Starting execution of SSIS_HOTFIX_INSTALL.SQL : : Error: 9002, Severity: 17, State: 4. The...
Continue reading...VMware vSphere Storage Performance – Thick vs Thin Provisioning
Industry experts will tell you that virtualization of your environment is not done to improve performance, it’s done to make it cheaper and easier to manage. The task of most VM administrators is to cram as many VMs into a farm as possible. One of the ways is to accomplish that is to allocate “thin provisioned” storage to each VM.For each VM that is created, the VM admin has to specify the number of virtual CPUs, the amount of virtual RAM, the number and size of each virtual disk, as well as a few other items. The virtual disks can...
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