A simple, yet very powerful script that will backup all of the databases on your Microsoft SQL Server to flat file for easy backup and restore. Additional features, such as limiting the number of archive files to keep and copying the latest file to a different directory, are also available.

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Today I was a client’s corporate office configuring a new Cisco PIX 506 firewall with VPN support. While the PIX supports IPSEC, we decided to use PPTP because client side configuration on Windows 2000/XP is very straight forward and rather simple for a non-technical employee to configure.

After configuring PPTP on the PIX (which is a snap), I configured and tested a Windows XP workstation using a dialup connection. While the test was a success (the tunnel was established and the secure network could be accessed), internet access failed because the PIX won’t/can’t redirect traffic that isn’t on it’s local network (Plug: the Cisco VPN Concentrator can perform this task with ease). A simple fix for this problem would appear to be to modify the Windows VPN connection and disable the use default gateway on remote network option, but now no traffic is getting though the VPN tunnel to the secure network.

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A quick and simple way to limit the amount of files in a certain directory. Maybe I shouldn’t use the word limit – how about manage. A quick and simple way to manage the number of files of a certain file type in a directory.

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It’s when the simple things don’t work that I get mad. I’ve been working on one of our servers all day using Windows Terminal Services in remote administration mode. Somewhere between Thanksgiving dinner #1 and #2, my connection decided to drop causing it to continue to run on the server. While this typically wouldn’t be a problem, it appears that someone else has done the same thing (probably not today) which now makes it impossible to log into my server remotely.

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