SQL Server 2005 Cannot Uninstall due to IIsMimeMap

Today I was trying to remove and reinstall an SQL Server 2005 installation from one of my servers. This resulted in the following error

The setup failed to read IIsMimeMap table. The error code is -2147024893

I did some search on the net and this MSDN Post had the answer.

The main cause of this is that there is some interaction with the IIS with the Reporting Service in the SQL server 2005 installation.

It is actually easy to work around this issue.

• Go to the service control panel.
• Find IIS Administrator
• Disable the service and stop it.
• Uninstall the SQL 2005 (by now the only remenant is the uninstalled Reporting service).

That will work.

How to Clear Voicemail Message Waiting Icon on Cingular/ATT

It is really annoying when there actually is no message on the voice mail but the message waiting indicator continue to be on.

This usually is not a problem for those who get a lot of messages, but I hardly get a voice mail message (goes to say I am really so good at managing people, or I am really unpopular... who cares! Well, actually I get most of my messaging via email.)

But if this ever happens remember;

Don't call "Cingular and now AT&T!" to have this fixed. I tried Actually they cannot or will not reset this from their end.

But there is an easy 2-minute solution to this. Just leave a message on your cell phone yourself from another phone and listen to it from the cell phone. That will make it go away.

XCOPY incompatible with NTFS Mount Points

Well it is bizarre and the final answer may be elsewhere, and it may even be specific to our iSCSI SAN configuration etc.

But you might run into the same situation as I have.

We wanted to copy the entire directory and files underneath it from one place in a file system (say a network share) to under a mount point directory (say C:\lotsofiles) in hosted by an iSCSI SAN, and to do so, I used XCOPY commands.

What happens next, when you do this is that XCOPY ignores the mount point and happily copy files to the drive. We saw the C: drive's space directly. As soon as XCOPY starts to run, it will cause some error and ISCSI volumes are no longer bound!

This issue does not occur, for example if you drag and drop files using the Explorer, use COPY command or do a deep copy using cp.exe in the UnxUtils package. So I know it is very specific to XCOPY

SQL Server 2005 Management Studio Slow to Come Up

You may have run into the situation in which the SQL Server Management Studio is extremely slow to come up on some (but not all) servers on your network.

David Tan posted a very great message on the MSDN Forum about this. But essentially the cause of this is that the Management Studio is trying to access the (digital) Certificate Revocation List crl.microsoft.com at Microsoft at start up, and if the server happens to be behind a firewall or no-Internet then it has to wait for the timeout.

If this server must sit behind the firewall without any chance to get out to the Internet (like inside the hospital network, or a QA test lab) then the one way to work around this is to configure the firewall so that it will immediately reject the connection when it sees the URL to crl.microsoft.com

UPDATE: (6/19/2010): More direct answer by Microsoft on this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555686 is to essentially to turn off the Online MSDN Books feature and also to turn off CRL Lookup from the Internet Explorer altogether.

Here is a cheap cheat if we have a web server in the same local network (only do this if your system always has no hope of getting out to the Internet, and you already made an enemy with your IT department).

Under your system32 directory there is drivers\etc directory. Edit the hosts file in there so that crl.microsoft.com points to a running web server.