Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Tools: Capture Http/https traffic: Web Browsers

This is a good tool to look at how a web application is interacting with browsers on a client machine.

http://fiddler2.com/features

Look at session metrics
Filter captured traffic
Checking headers

Servers: Windows: IIS: Remove Headers

Install Microsoft URL scan and edit C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\urlscan\UrlScan.ini choose 'Remove Server Header' and configure it to be a '1'.

Software to install Microsoft Urlscan Filter


Tuesday, October 8, 2013

How to restart an unresponse Windows VM from the command line in Citrix xen server

If you have tried to restart or force restart a windows VM from the Citrix console and it does not work you can follow this procedure to make sure it restarts.

Run xe-toolstack-restart from the command line and it will show the virtual machine running state. In this case the virtual machine is not responding.

The dom-id associated with the vm is unresponsive in the xenserver control domain.
You can recover by terminating the dom-id for the virtual  machine or reboot the xen server.

This is the procedure as listed in http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX131421
  1. Run the following command to check the dom-id of the virtual machine in the XenServer control domain:
    list_domains | grep

    Following is a sample of the preceding command:
    [root@Xen6 ~]# list_domains | grep bcdb1445-1f28-9600-ae84-53c254167ae6
    Output :
    51 | bcdb1445-1f28-9600-ae84-53c254167ae6 | H
    51 – the dom-id of the VM
    bcdb1445-1f28-9600-ae84-53c254167ae6 – UUID of the VM
    H – state of the virtual machine (H indicates that this is a HVM guest, typically it means this is a Windows virtual machine.)
    Refer to the Knowledge Center article CTX127896 – How to Use the XenServer Xentop Utility for more information about the other possible Virtual Machine states.
  2. Run the following command to destroy the dom-id of the virtual machine:
  3. destroy_domain –dom-id
  4. Following is a sample of the preceding command:
    /opt/xensource/debug/xenops destroy_domain –domid 51

Monday, October 7, 2013

How to change the owner of a SQL database when the owner has been removed.


On a  server some of the databases are inaccessible to the SA user.
This requires running this command to see who the owner is

sp_helpdb DBNAME

Once you know how to change the owner just run this to change the owner to the SA and you can then perform the admin you require


USE dbname
EXEC sp_changedbowner 'SA'

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

When you a problem with a remove or even a local pc and you are worried that it is not going to restart properly you can force a restart with this command.

shutdown -t 0 -r -f

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

How to identify SQL Collation used

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('DBName', 'Collation') SQLCollation;




Just type in the DBName of the database you want to check

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Virtualisation: Technologies

Cloudstack takes virtualisation to the next level.


  • Its open source
  • It supports Xen Server, Xen Server Cloud, VMWare, KVM and OracleV


http://cloudstack.com/