Do you get error messages in the System or Application event logs?

Are they developing their applications on their local machines or on an application development server?

Are you looking at using some kind of a 3dns system for handling the changeover from primary to backup sql node?

Judging by what you are saying you are in a...

Why not just not allow the developers to install the sql binaries on their machines? Or do they need those?

How about going into Admin Tools --> Services and checking that the SQL Server service is running under a localsystem accout rather than a Domain user account. If you are...

What kind of data pipe are you going to have for this, dark fibre?

Hardware mirror is good, in full synch mode (which is what it appears you are going to...

Scripting the upload makes sense, as does calling it through a cmdexec within a dts, this does however have the drawback of not logging that the ftp transfer went without...

I've used this.

TSIM is awesome,  I used to use TSIM to do that snapshot to back up the databases every night, and to also bring up a log shipping server...

I remember spending a lot of time trying to figure this one out last year. Eventually a guy that I worked with who was "in the know" told me that...

If your users are connecting through an application server you can put the SQL Server behind a firewall and just allow access through the firewall to the app server IP...

Bogus answer...robbed of a couple of points.....

If you only have 3Gb RAM don't use the /3GB switch, only use this is you have 4Gb RAM.

I believe that it's the SQL Agent service account that is critical, as this is what does all the work (ie dumping, copying and restoring files). So long as you...

In the past when I've done this the service account on both machines was the same and was an admin on the box, with the builtin/administrators group in sql this...

I have some cream that will take care of that