Friday, September 23, 2011

MS SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 fails with error 84C4000E

Windows updates are fine, they make sure your system gets updated when needed.

Sometimes you get strange error numbers with the message that a update did fail.

Today we had a error 84C4000E when installing SP1 of SQL Express 2008R2 on a Windows 2008 Server.
Normaly google helps solving the problem, not (completely) this time:

The only reference to the error number I was able to find was:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/es-ES/sqlserveres/thread/05050d46-d6f9-41e4-8276-46750dabe88f


Spanish... ok, google helps translating....

So it turned down to the following issue:

  • Your windows server is installed/configured in a language not supported by SQL 2008R2
  • Such "wrong" combinations are for example German-Swiss and trying to install a German edition of SQL 2008R2 (Or aparently also some variants of spanish)

The simplest thing to solve this:
  • Just change your user locale from German-Swiss to German-Germany
  • Install the service pack
  • Change the user locale back to what is was previously

During installation we had similar problems and after some talk with MS support it did turn out that a German SQL Server 2008R2 can't be installed if the user locale was no German-Germany.
So changing it to the requested locale did the trick.

Strange enough, we later on wished to enter the product key... again the same problem and after more talk with MS support, changing the locale again did the trick...

According to MS support it should also be possible to change the locale to English-US and a german SQL Server should also be "installable"...

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Adding more redundancy to postfix with ldap store

When using postfix with a ldap backend for storing user data is a common setup.

There exist a lot of guides on how to do this, for example:

http://www.howtoforge.com/postfix-virtual-hosting-with-ldap-backend-and-with-dovecot-as-imap-pop3-server-on-ubuntu-karmic-koala-9.10

or

http://linuxgazette.net/124/pfeiffer.html

These are good starting points for getting your MTA up and running.
When your business grows and becomes more "mission critical" it's time to look at what you can do to provide moreprotection against system failures.

As you might have seen, in the config file you have to add these ldap host definitions:

domains_server_host =

To protect you against ldap server failures, you can simply specify multiple ldap url's
in the standard ldap syntax.

This gives then:

domains_server_host =  ldap:// ldap://



You can even add more servers to the list if required.
If you use smtp authentication for mail submission, then you probably also have saslauthd configured. To benefit from the same redundancy just modify the ldap_servers line in the saslauthd.conf file too

ldap_servers: ldap:// ldap://


After reloading postfix and saslauthd the new configuration is active