Milwaukee Wisconsin TechNet Briefing Questions (and Answers)

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Hello again, my Milwaukee friends!  Other than a noisy start, and an annoying fire drill interruption, I had a great time with you all!  How did you like the event?  I got a few helpful comments, but if you have more to say please feel free to email me or, even better, enter your comments here in feedback so we can discuss them.  For example – I’m not so sure this was a good venue to come back to.  To be blunt – the staff at the Sheraton was hard to find and not very helpful, the pastries were not very good, and the room was not set very well.  But if you like it as a convenient location, rather than the MayFair Mall in Wauwatosa, or if you have other venue suggestions, please let us know!

Anyway.. Here are the promised answers to the questions I jotted down during our event; things that I wanted to look into further.  I hope you find them useful.

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Q: Can the new SCW (Security Configuration Wizard) included in SP1 for Windows Server 2003 target other server versions besides Windows Server 2003? Like maybe Windows 2000 Server?

A: SCW is very limited in as far as what servers it can target.  It only runs on or targets servers that are running Windows Server 2003 with SP1 installed.  That’s it.  See the “Quick Start Guide” for more informaiton about SCW.

 

Q: I’ve noticed that if I have an installation CD of Windows Server 2003 with SP1, and another I386 folder containing a Windows Server 2003 install image that includes the SP1 bits slipstreamed into it, the two installation images are not identical. I perform a “diff” against them and see there are differences. Why is that?

A: Well… I wasn’t able to find anything on our web sites about this.  I don’t really know why this would be – unless there are subtle changes or some tools that aren’t updated in the same way.  (Does anyone else reading this have an explanation for this?)

 

Q: When using the DTA (Database Tuning Advisor) in SQL Server 2005, after I apply the recommended changes, can I roll them back somehow automatically?

A: No.  There is no automated way to do this.  I would be selective about the changes you make, and make sure you keep a copy of scripted changes, so that if you need to you can edit the scripts (replacing “ADD”s with “DROP”s, and vice versa) so that you can execute it and undo what was done.

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Any other questions or comments?  Be sure to send your feedback here.