Geeks 4 Data

I have been doing Scrum for years and have had some great teachers ( Richard Hundhausen , Derek Davidson and even Jeff Sutherland  - well, I read his book :-)) but one very important aspect of of the framework has continued to haunt me until now. I have always struggled to explain the difference between effort and work required and no matter how many times I suggested that effort was related to complexity I was never able to come up with an analogy or explanation that would suffice. The team would constantly revert to the assumption that effort meant how much of the sprint (therefore time) would be needed to complete the work; I would say, "no, that is what we use work remaining for" and the team would invariably reply "what's the point of effort then?". The other day while explaining the importance of doing design in the planning meeting to a bunch of colleagues, one very astute colleague asked the question "won't we run out of time in the planni...

Just provisioned a bunch of nice shiny new VMs with Windows Server 2016 Core, joined to the domain, proxy set and Windows Updates applied. All ready for DSC except that I can't connect remotely! The following red text annoys me: So I try a few things... 1) Try remoting from a VM on the same host - nada 2) Try removing the proxy - nada (just got a different exception) 3) Reboots - nada So then I decided to talk to a network\infrastructure dude to get help ( caus I is a dev ). A huff and puff and some jiggery pokery later and it turns out DNS was holding static records for the previous versions of the machines. You see, the VMs were shiny and new but their names weren't. Once the static DNS records were deleted I could remote! Adds weight to the argument that VMs should be named generically. Shout out to Si for helping me with this :-)

This one is just for me :-) Using git via command line will often (but not always??) change the context of the command window to Vim which is lovely and all but it is not that obvious how to get back to the normal command prompt. Sadly, 'esc' does not do it, you have to type wq at the colon prompt. Not that intuitive but hey...

Ever had that feeling that gremlins are at work? Keep going round in circles and start contemplating a career change? Well... I have been struggling with getting Reporting Services 2016 configured to use Windows Authentication, ala kerberos ( as my previous post alluded). In the past this has been a relatively trivial task but this last week I have found new depths of despair and frustration. So let me explain the scenario: GIVEN a reporting services server that is built by DSC AND the ReportServer service is running on port 80 AND the ReportServer.config file has been modified (see docs ) WHEN the HTTP/mymachine.mydomain.com SPN is added for myaccount THEN Windows Authentication is enabled for SSRS :-) AND PowerShell remote sessions (WinRM) is broken :-( So, me thinking I was clever, simply added port 80 to the SPN definition which fixed WinRM and broke SSRS. That sucks! It seems you can only have one or the other.

I thought I knew how SQL Server manages statistics and started writing some maintenance procedures to augment the built in stats maintenance. All was well until I sat down to test my code and applied the principles of black box testing. This made me think about what I needed happen rather than what I was expecting to write in the implementation of the code. I wrote the following acceptance criteria: Table statistics are updated whenever the number of records in a table increases by a percentage defined at the instance level. Simple enough, so I started by investigating how SQL does things by default and I came across this excellent SQLBits presentation by Maciej Pilecki: https://sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event7/Lies_Damned_Lies_And_Statistics_Making_The_Most_Out_of_SQL_Server_Statistics After watching this I realised that what my code needed to do was provide a mechanism for overriding the default threshold for updating stats and not to simple schedule routine stats update statements...

I wonder if there is a word that invokes more feelings of frustration for an IT dude than  kerberos? This shouldn't be the case because there is a great number of useful resources out there to help you understand and troubleshoot the issues that occur in kerberos land. However, none of these troubleshooting guides remind you of one very important thing, be patient ! This is because kerberos is a security protocol that deals with distributed objects and services that involve synchronization and expiration and unless your name is Mark Russinovich and you have every Windows related command at your disposal, you are sometimes just going to have to wait a bit for certain things to synchronize or expire. Don't assume  that adding an SPN will immediately cause kerberos authentication to start working and read the documentation  (that last bit was for me). Yesterday I was working on a custom DSC resource for adding SPNs and my code ended up generating a couple of really w...

I recently wrote some help comments for a PowerShell function and needed to show an example directory structure and because I have, ermm, issues, I wanted a way to do it exactly the same in all my help comments. So, the inevitable Google search began and I soon discovered tree.exe, which did the trick. I am blogging about this because tree.exe comes with a nasty little issue that I want to remember (and you can benefit - how nice of me ;-)). Running the following produces a tree structure with garbage encoding: PS:\>Tree $Path /F | Out-File C:\Temp\tree.txt And adding the -Encoding parameter doesn't help. The only way I managed to make this useful is to pipe the tree output to the clipboard and paste it into notepad, like so: PS:\>Tree $Path /F | Clip Result! This stackoverflow thread helps explain the issue nicely:  http://stackoverflow.com/a/139302