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Category: Linux

Using Windows Authentication on Non-Windows Devices

Published 2019-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele shows us how to connect to SQL Server using Windows Authentication if you’re not coming from a Windows device:

SQL Server supports different kinds of authentication mechanisms and protocols: the older NTLM protocol, and Kerberos. A lot of people cringe when you mention Kerberos because, well, Kerberos is hard. It’s arcane, it’s complex, and it’s hard to even describe unless you use it on the regular.

Simply put, it’s a ticketing and key system: you, a user, requests a ticket from a store, usually by authenticating to it via a username and password. If you succeed, you get a ticket that get stored within your local machine. Then, when you want to access a resource (like a SQL Server), the client re-ups with the store you got your initial ticket from (to make sure it’s still valid), and you get a “key” to access the resource. That key is then forwarded onto the resource, allowing you to access the thing you were trying to connect to. It’s way, way more complex than this, with lots of complicated terms and moving parts, so I’m doing a lot of hand-waving, but that’s the core of the system. If that kind of stuff excites you, go Google it, and I promise you’ll get more than you ever bargained for.

Kerberos is a scary beast to me, mostly because I don’t spend enough time working directly with it.

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Pacemaker Changes Affecting SQL on Linux

Published 2019-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West has an important message if you’re running SQL Server on Linux:

Heads up for SQL Server on Linux folks using availability groups and Pacemaker. Pacemaker 1.1.18 has been out for a while now, but it’s worth mentioning that there was a behaviour change in how it fails-over a cluster. While the new behaviour is considered “correct”, it may affect you if you’ve configured availability groups on a previous version (specifically 1.1.16).

Click through for more details and what you can do about this.

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SQL Server and Ubuntu 18.04

Published 2019-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West confirms that SQL Server on Linux will run on Ubuntu 18.04 even though it is not (yet) supported:

Although these screenshots show SQL Server 2019 preview CTP 2.3, this also applies to SQL Server 2017 on 18.04.2, because that’s what I had installed before upgrading the SQL Server version. However, as my friend Jay Falck pointed out on Twitter, Microsoft has stated publicly that it is not yet certified for production use:

Important, this does not change the support state of SQL Server 2017 on Ubuntu 18.04. Work to certify Ubuntu 18.04 with SQL Server 2017 is planned and we will announce when it will be supported for production use on this page. Until such as an announcement occurs, SQL Server 2017 on Ubuntu 18.04 should be considered experimental and for non-production use only.

Read on for Randolph’s thoughts on the issue.

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SqlServer Module Now with Invoke-Sqlcmd

Published 2019-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson alerts us to a new preview of the SqlServer Powershell module:

If you’re still on an earlier version of PSCore and are unable to install PSCore 6.2 right now, you can still download preview of the SqlServer module to get the latest fixes and new features.  You just won’t be able to use the Invoke-Sqlcmd cmdlet.

Another quick thing to note is that this is like a v.0.0.1 of Invoke-SqlCmd on PSCore; it does not have all the bells & whistles of the version of Invoke-Sqlcmd for [full blown] Windows PowerShell.  Obviously, more features will be added over time, but the basic functionality was ready to for customers to start “kicking the tires”.

Read on for more notes and the link to check this all out.

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Updating SQL Server on Linux Docker Images

Published 2019-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad shows us how you can make a change to the default SQL Server container and save it for your own purposes:

The “docker commit …” command, you’ll provide both the image-name (all lowercase) and a TAG name (uppercase allowed). You can be creative in having an naming conversion for you images repositories.

It’s very important to save images after doing the commit. I found out that having an active container would be useless without an image.  As far as I know, I haven’t found a way to rebuild an image from an existing container if the image was previously removed.

Max has a full demo, including installing various tools and programs as well as tips on how to minimize the pain.

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Changing Red Hat’s SSH Port On An Azure VM

Published 2019-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal has a post showing you how to change the default SSH port on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux VM hosted in Azure:

The steps that need to be performed are:
– Allow the new port in the RHEL firewall
– Change the SSH daemon to listen on the new port
– Add an incoming rule in the VM network security group for the new port
– Remove the rule that allows port 22

The Ubuntu process will be pretty close to this as well.

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Building A Kubernetes Cluster With Kubespray

Published 2019-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Adkin continues a series on Kubernetes clusters:

In essence Kubespray is a bunch of Ansible playbooks; yaml file that specify what actions should take place against one or more machines specified in a hosts.ini file, this resides in what is known as an inventory. Of all the infrastructure as code tools available at the time of writing, Ansible is the most popular and has the greatest traction. Examples of playbooks produced by Microsoft can be found on GitHub for automating tasks in Azure and deploying SQL Server availability groups on Linux. The good news for anyone into PowerShell is that PowerShell modules can be installed via Ansible and PowerShell commands can be executed via Ansible. Also, there are people already using PowerShell desired state configuration with Ansible. Ansible’s popularity is down to the facts it is easy to pick up and agent-less because it relies on ssh, hence why one of the steps in this post includes the creation of keys for ssh. This free tutorial is highly recommended for anyone wishing to pick up Ansible.

Click through for a step-by-step tutorial.

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Attaching Databases Via Dockerfile

Published 2018-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shares a better technique for attaching database files held outside of a Docker container:

Now this works a treat. It waits ten seconds for the SQL instance to come up within the container and then runs the sqlcmd script below.
The problem with this is, it’s a bit of a hack. The HEALTHCHECK command isn’t designed to run once, it’ll carry on running every 10 seconds once the container comes up…not great.
So, what’s the better way of doing it?

Andrew gives us a clear explanation of what’s going on and gives a shout out to Bob Ward’s SQL Server on Linux book.

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Managing Powershell Core On Non-Windows Machines

Published 2018-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad shows us how to grab the latest version of Powershell Core if you aren’t using Windows:

So, if PowerShell Core isn’t available in the package repository, with a few steps you can download and install PowerShell. But, the first thing I do is to remove it before installing.

Ubuntu

## - When PowerShell Core isn't available in their repository: (download and execute install)
cd Downloads
wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v6.1.1/powershell_6.1.1-1.ubuntu.18.04_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i powershell_6.1.1-1.ubuntu.18.04_amd64.deb

## - When available in Apt/Apt-Get repository:
sudo apt install -y powershell #-> Or, powershell-preview

Click through for demos of CentOS (or any other yum-based system) and MacOS X.

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