Upcoming Events

I am excited to announce that I will be speaking this Thursday at the Louisville SQL Server User Group meeting on the New Features of SQL Server 2012.   The User Group meets at 5:30pm at the Duthie Center for Engineering at the University of Louisville. 

I also have 2 upcoming SSWUG events

The 4-Hour DBA: Automate, Audit and Relax on Feb 15.  

I will also be a part of a Security Expo on Feb 17th.  I don't have a link yet, but when I do I will let you know

 

Basic Troubleshooting

I have been a DBA for a long time and I guess that there are just some things that have become second nature for me and I forget that when people are new to SQL Server they often are overwhelmed, when there is an outage and waste time troubleshooting the wrong issue.  


Recently, I was called about a SQL Server outage.  Here were the facts:

• 3 servers were impacted
• The servers could not be pinged
• The servers would not allow users to login with domain credentials directly via the console.
• All the servers were on the same subnet in the same rack behind a firewall
• Other servers in the same rack were up and responding to requests
• No changes have been made for months to any of these servers

An hour of time was was spent trying to troubleshoot this as a SQL Server issue, when it was clearly not.   Do you know what the issue was?  The answer is in the comments.