When doing the same thing we had the active node at sp 2 with some updates applied. I seem to remember that we had to go back down to...

check it: http://www.sqlteam.com/article/monitoring-sql-server-agent-with-powershell

Looks promising.

Where is your DNS?

Are you setting your cluster up for production, or is this a test lab on an isolated network?

Where is your DNS? You could try creating it there.

I remember there...

If you are concerned about this, you need to start tracking the size of your database. You can then plot the growth on a graph and estimate the day...

Bad locking will result in excessive blocking - and your application will start to get deadlocks or slowness.

You could look on your DNS server, or just "PING SERVER" at the command line.

You specify the virtual server name and the sql setup registers it with your DNS server....

osql uses odbc

sqlcmd is the new replacement which uses ole db. I would assume it would be the wisest choice to use - it would probably give your solution...

credential:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190703.aspx

proxy:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189064.aspx

But note that the password is stored in the credential, so this shouldn't be your personal account, rather, a service account with a non-expiring password.

I believe you need to find out what account sql agent service is running under and grant the appropriate permissions to it. Otherwise you need to create a 'credential'...

I like to log on to the server as the service account and test to make sure I can access resources, such as shares.

Is your sql agent using...

If it does seem that the file is actually locked, you might process monitor to get to the bottom of it.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

Thanks for your feedback.

How would the IO subsystem effect communication with our domain controller? I don't see why it would choose to let administrators in during that scenario either...

You just need to install the sqlcmd.exe whereever you want to run the backups from.

If you open cmd and type sqlcmd /? (of course you need to be...

I see this article for sql express 2008, so it must be available.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165702.aspx

Looks like it's in the sql express toolkit:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms365251.aspx

dl: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e8ad606a-0960-4efd-8bd7-b21370c7be2b&DisplayLang=en