SQL 7.0 server failure

Today was not a good day, but it wasn’t a bad day either.
We’ve got a couple legacy vendor apps that still have to run on MS SQL 7, one of which “brands” the server on install. So, we’ve been hesitant to move it off the 4+ year old NT4 server that it was originally installed on. That got hurried along today, as the RAID1 logical drive the OS was installed on suffered a simulataneous failure of both drives.
Luckily, the OS was still functional enough to:

  1. Stop the SQL server service
  2. Copy off the SQL data files

After grabbing those, we proceded to install a new server (glad we had some spare new hardware laying around) with Windows 2000 and SQL 7. Because we kept the drive layout identical to the failed server, we could change the raw database files “under the hood” and it would still work (cross your fingers). After patching it up to the same level as the failed server, stop the SQL service, move the existing Data, Logs and Backups folder out of the MSSQL7 folder and move the copies off the failed server in, start the service….Bingo, users, data, sps, maintanence plans, the whole shebang came along just fine….

Yay for applications that don’t use the registry to store all their configuration data. I’ve got to give some of the credit for this to Marty, he first tried this when migrating another one of our database servers from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003. It worked flawlessly on SQL 2000, I figured it was worth a try on SQL 7 also.

Then this afternoon I got to shift gears completely and work on proxyarp on a LEAF router I installed as a consulting job. Now I just hope the ISP can make their registration system work with our kludge.

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