In an earlier post, I mentioned a bug that I think that we found in SQL Server 2005 Clustering. I have confirmed the bug. The bug goes again like this:
You have 2 Windows 2003 machines and one or both have been named with lower at least 1 lower case letter in the name. Now you may think, how can this happen, because when I installed the Servers I saw in the name of the machine all upper case letters in the dialog box. What you don’t know is that when you don’t put CAPS LOCK on or don’t hold the shift key down, it is recording the name in mixed case, even though the dialog shows upper case. This will be important later.
This is my findings (with help from another student in the Clustering Class from Ameriteach in Denver
Now you have 2 servers and you are ready to cluster them together. Now you launch Cluster Administrator in Windows 2003 and it allows you to cluster. Now the interesting thing is that when you see the dialog box to add the server to the Cluster, it will show you a name in the box. This name is retrieved from HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesTcpIpParamtersHostName registry key. The interesting thing is that when you add it to the Cluster, it will show the cluster machines in the list in Cluster Admin, and the name is retrieved for the list from HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetComputerNameActiveComputerName so if they are different (which I have not found a reason that they would be, but this is what our testing revealed) then you would see wierd behavior.
When you get the machines in the cluster, then you will attempt to install SQL Server. If you have any lower case letters in the machine name, it will let you run setup, and then it will get to the part where it wants to install SQL on the clustered machine, and it fails to find the node. My hunch is that it just does a binary compare on the machine name and does not find it since “ben1” is not equal to “BEN1” unless it looks case insensitive. You will get an error that the “Parameter is incorrect” and it will fail and rollback the install.
The other thing to note, is that when SQL Setup rolls back the install, it will not remove the Cluster Resource based on the dll and it will not delete the SQL Resources that it created, you will have to do that manually. Not a very good cleanup routine for a setup.
I will be filing a bug in Connect so that the SQL Team can have a look. I will update this post or create a new one when I have created the bug and it has a URL.
Happy landing and see you out there.
Any luck on getting this resolved?
I am working with Microsoft Support on getting them to validate that this is the case, and I will be posting a new post with updates as we go through this. It was this long to get them on the hook, so wish me luck.
I think this bug has already been resolved.
Would you tell me which theme think yousing? Or was it tailor made?
It is the Headway Tabloid theme.