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How to view the description of the last reboot of the Windows Server?

Posted by jp chen on April 6th, 2014

Most likely, you have experienced the scenario that your monitoring software or your own customize monitoring alerted you that SQL Server had restarted and you wish to find out the reasons on why it was restarted. You looked into the SQL Server Error Logs, but no details on the restarts. You wanted to look into the Event Viewer to find more details. It contains the Application, Internet Explorer, Security, and System sections. Each one of them has hundreds to thousands of entries. Mindboggling! What should you do? You can try to filter the System event logs on the “Event source” by the category of “USER32” to get started.

Steps:
1. Browse to “Computer Management,” under “System Tools” expand the “Event Viewer” main folder.
2. Right-click on “System” and then select “Properties.”
3. On the “System Properties” dialog box, click on the “Filter” tab.
4. On the “Event source:” drop-down box, select “USER32” and then click on the “OK” button:

5. Click on the most recent entry of the event on the result set to view the description of the reboot and the timestamp along with other relevant details:

Posted in Windows Administration

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How to resolve the Windows 7 Error 0×80070522 “A required privilege is not held by the client.”?

Posted by jp chen on January 25th, 2014

Speaking of frustration!: You are the owner of your laptop as you have spent more than a thousand dollars on it and you have made sure you are the administrator or your user account is belonging to the administrator group. When you try to create or paste a text file into your C:\ drive, Windows throws you the error

Error 0×80070522 “A required privilege is not held by the client.”

It is similar to being locked out of your own car or having so much spams on your WordPress blogs that you are disabling the comments.

This reminds me of the funny DIRECTV commercials.

You are upset! When you are upset you start Googling how to resolve the problem. When you start Googling, you get misleading answers by the experts who are trying to increase their points in the various websites that give credits for the first responders or voted by some people as the correct answers when they have not even tried the solutions proposed. When you follow those advice to change the security settings or change ownership of the C:\ drive, you cause your computer to lock you out of the C:\ drive -> deny you access to your own C:\ drive. Think twice before follow those advice. Try the following instead:
1. Click Start > Run > SECPOL.MSC.
2. Once the “Local Security Policy” window opens, under “Security Settings” > Local Policies > Security Options.
3. Scroll down to find “User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode” and then disable it. Yes -> disable it. Then, click the OK button.
4. Restart your computer.

Posted in Error Messages, Windows Administration

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How to look up the hostname based on the IP address?

Posted by jp chen on January 13th, 2014

During troubleshooting, you have reviewed the SQL Server Error log and found the error messages have the ip address appended to them like the following:

Login failed for user ‘DOMAIN\user’. Reason: Token-based server access validation failed with an infrastructure error. Check for previous errors. [CLIENT: 123.45.6.789]”

You may have asked yourself: Wouldn’t it be nice if Microsoft had helped us all out by including both the ip address and the hostname in the error message? Yes it would ideal. But, as with everything else in life – it’s not supposed to be perfect. You have to work your way to get what you need.
To look up the host named based on the ip address you will need to use the NBTSTAT command.

Implementation Steps:
1. Find the ip address in the error message or just simple get an ip address you wish to look up its host name.
2. On the command prompt, key in NBTSTAT –A ###.###.###.###. Then, press enter. Where ###.###.###.### is the ip address you wish to resolve to a hostname.

REFERENCE:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc940106.aspx