SQL Server Installation - license agreement cannot be located

Another problem which I had to resolve in last days. During installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 following error may appear

When you installing from command line

The following error occurred:
The SQL Server license agreement cannot be located for the selected edition, <VERSION>. This could be a result of corrupted media or the edition being unsupported by the media.

Error result: -2054422501
Result facility code: 1420
Result error code: 27

Please review the summary.txt log for further details

And this one when you try to install using classic GUI

SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:

The SQL Server license agreement cannot be located for the selected edition, <VERSION>. This could be a result of corrupted media or the edition being unsupported by the media.

Error code 0x858C001B.

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=20476&ProdName=Microsoft%20SQL%20Server&EvtSrc=setup.rll&EvtID=50000&EvtType=0xFDC38F1F%25400xA40CEF17%25401420%254027

SQL Server Setup failure

Version = [Datacenter | Enterprise | Standard | Web | Business Intelligence | Workgroup | Express]


SOLUTION :


- MUI Language must also match SQL language version (even if you have for example en-US locales and en-US SQL installation media and different MUI language then you may get this error! If you need to use another MUI than SQL installation is, just switch to matched MUI corresponding with SQL installation and then after installation switch it back.
- Or use corresponding SQL language version.
- The other are for sure clear: System locales must match SQL language version - setup will detect this anyway and display correct message.

How to check currently used MUI Language from command

Today I spent another time to investigate how to achieve that. I googled out lot of sites, but most of them doesn't bring desired solution, even when they discussed exactly this problem:

http://www.visualbasicscript.com/Detecting-MUI-OSLanguage-m40687.aspx
http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/117085-os-display-language-switcher/
... and some other

I tried also 'systeminfo', or registry ("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MuiCached"), or even wmic and so on... All of them responded mostly with system locales or which language OS was installed originally instead of telling which MUI is used.

This one finally help:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/35e542d7-404d-463d-bb49-6c2bd76867dd/collections-on-active-mui-language-not-os-language

Easy solution:

reg query "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop" -v PreferredUILanguages

If you need this to store as variable just use FOR command with /F parameter:

FOR /F "skip=1 tokens=3" %%I IN ('reg query "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop" /v "PreferredUILanguages"') do SET Current_MUI=%%I

Basic info about MUI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_User_Interface

Can't install / enable .NET Framework feature on Windows 8 / 2012

Recenly I had problem to activate .NET feature on Windows server 2012. I tried to activate this feature from server manager which is the easiest way, but this ended with this error:

The source files could not be found. Try installing the roles, roles services, or features again in a new Add Roles and Features Wizard session, and on the Confirmation page of the wizard, click "Specify an alternate source path" to specify a valid location of source files that are required for the installation. The location must be accessible by the computer account of the destination server.

Then I tried to follow instructions from that message. I specified the path to the Windows image. In my case: F:\sources\sxs. But this surprisingly ended again with same message!

Another approach: Try to install it from command line using DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management) with this command:

Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All

and this one to specify the the source files:

Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All /Source:F:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess 

Both of them ended up again with same error like in previous cases using wizard:
only difference in errorcodes:

Without source files specified: Error: 0x800f0906
With source files specified: Error: 0x800f081f

The source files could not be downloaded.
Use the "source" option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the feature. For more information on specifying a source location, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243077.

The DISM log file can be found at C:\Windows\Logs\DISM\dism.log

Analyzing DISM log file doesn't bring any news.

Then I followed this article from Microsoft, which can somebody help, but me not: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2734782/en-us

All these I tried under domain administrator account and under local administrator too. All the time same response. 

Working solution for me:
1. Take out server from domain
2. Login with local administrator and Enable .NET feature
3. Re-Join server in to domain

I hope that can help someone.

Windows BATCH - how to get optical drive letter (CD/DVD)

Windows Batch - Find optical drive (CD/DVD/BD)

This script lists all available optical drives available on system using WMIC and then using loop command saves last listed letter in to variable.

@Echo OFF
:: Script to find and set optical drive available on system

SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
SET "WMIC=WMIC path win32_logicaldisk where drivetype^=4 get caption"

FOR /F "usebackq delims=" %%i IN (`%WMIC% ^|findstr ":"`) DO SET OPT=%%i
SET OPTICAL_DRV=%OPT:~0,2%

ECHO %OPTICAL_DRV%

Install server certificates for WHM services - mail, ftp and web interface

Even though this is simple task I decide to describe it. WHM / cPanel system is really complex and overlooking some settings can easily happen. That's what happened also to me. I think there are 2 reasons:
1. This task is not on daily basis - certificates are generated for longer periods - year or more years
2. Settings for SSL in WHM is not on one place and that is bit confusing.

To secure communication on WHM's important services:

- Web interface (WHM, cPanel, Webmail on SSL ports 2083, 2087, 2096)
- SMTP (Exim on port 25 - event. aditionally another)
- Mail (IMAP, POP3 -Dovecot on ports 993 and 995)
- SFTP (Pure-FTPD on port 20, 21,  event. aditionally another)

it is required to get some certificate from CA (certificate authority). There are lot of CA - you can Google it and compare their prices. Proper type of certificate is Class 2 - organizations, for which proof of identity is required. But if you are individualist or small project you can save some money here. Class 1 certificate is sufficient which is intended for securing web-mail and simillar applications like cPanel / WHM is. Some CA providing Class 1 certificates for free of charge like StarCom CA.

Specific steps:

1. Generate an SSL Certificate and Signing Request:
Go to WHM > SSL / TLS > Generate an SSL Certificate and Signing Request.
Fill all fields with your data. I recommend also filling last field to get certificate to email to have backup.

2. Sign your certificate by CA - cpecifics steps depends on CA.

3. As soon as CA sign the certificate you can install it to all services mentioned above under this navigation:
WHM > Service Configuration > Manage Service SSL Certificates

Note:

In order to configure secure communication without warnings it is also required to use proper hostname on client side for which was certificate issued. Otherwise user will see security warning - domain mismatch. Connection itself remains encrypted.

How to avoid 'repair with keycache' process in MySQL

This would be another quick post. I have encountered this problem few times and I hope that this could help other people making database recovery faster and more reliable.

If you see long running process 'repair with keycache' in MySQL 'process list' during database recovery that means your mysqld have insufficient resources to use standard method - 'repair by sorting'. Repair by Keycache is very slow - 5x - 10x slower (or even worse) depending on your setup, hardware performance and database contents.

You have to change you configuration following way:

1. Your setting 'tmpdir' in my.cnf points to file-system with low space storage. Be sure that you have at least 2x or more availabe space than database backup alone (in some scenarios maybe more). On some systems, administrators creating separate file-system for /tmp dir, which is good idea, but mostly it's very small, therefore insufficient for large database recovery. In this case just change your setting for example to /var/tmp/mysql

2. Check permissions on file-system of 'tmpdir'. Usually mysqld running under 'mysql' user. This user need to have r/w permissions to that directory.

3. Another variables need to be checked:
myisam_max_sort_file_size (several times larger than biggest table inside database)
myisam_sort_buffer_size (try 64MB or more)

I'm not explaining everything. I'm just trying to advice which things need to be tweaked.
Any comments appreciated.

Restoring single table from full MySQL dump file

That would be quick post. To restore single table from full MySQL backup it is required to filter all other sql commands which is not belonging to certain table.

 # sed -n -e '/CREATE TABLE.*Tablename/,/UNLOCK TABLES/p' full_backup.sql > table_recovery.sql

This command read content of  'full_backup.sql' and search for line containing "CREATE TABLE" followed with specified table name (just replace it with desired name). From this line starts sending to standard output. Then search for line "UNLOCK TABLES" - on this line stops sending contents. At the end of this command is redirection to file ">"

It is better to create intermediate file to be sure, that the filtering working as you expected, because this is based on sql commands. After "CREATE TABLE" statements comes pair of statements "LOCK TABLES" and "UNLOCK TABLES" which are used in 99% if not in 100%. You don't need to create intermediate file and you are sure you can pipe it directly to MySQL:

 # sed -n -e '/CREATE TABLE.*Tablename/,/UNLOCK TABLES/p' full_backup.sql | mysql -u user -p dbname