RunAs Radio

Are Public Folders evil? Peter Schmidt says no! Richard chats with Peter about Modern Public Folders that come with Exchange 2013. Treated more like regular mailboxes (only BIGGER), the public folders in Exchange 2013 are much easier for the administrator to handle while being essentially the same as far as the users are concerned. The migration is a bit tricky, but you can do it on-premise as wel...

How do you tune your stored procedures? While visiting Kim Tripp at her home, Richard chats with her about her approach to turning stored procedures. The conversation starts out focused on query plans, which applies to all sorts of things, but stored procedures have some special foibles around parameter sets and recompilation - there are good techniques and bad! Kim also digs into session paramete...

How do you manage your SQL Servers? Richard talks to Boris Hristov about using Policy-Based Management tools in SQL Server. These tools have been in the box since SQL Server 2008, but it's amazing how many folks still don't use them - are you really RDPing into every SQL Server? Hristov talks about using the Policy-Based Management tools to sweep across all of your SQL Servers and check what vario...

So what does it take to live stream the largest sporting events in the world? Richard chats with Ian Philpot, Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft, about his work troubleshooting streaming issues for events like the Winter Olympics in Sochi, 2014 FIFA World Cup and Super Bowl XLIX. Of course it takes a team to make a project like this happen, and Phil talks about the entire service chain, from NBC'...

Are you looking at Chef for deploying your infrastructure yet? Steven Murawski is back to talk about the latest development in Chef, including his role as the Community Software Development Engineer. Chef integrates with DSC and PowerShell to make managing your Windows instances and everything else much simpler when you roll out applications. Steven also talks about Chef going all open source, wit...

How fast can you analyze incoming data? Richard talks to Scott Klein about Azure Stream Analytics. Scott discusses how stream analytics is different from data warehousing, being an additional "near real time" service you can add to your application infrastructure to let you react faster to business opportunities. The conversation digs into gradual adoption of stream analytics, taking sma...

Virtualization at Microsoft continues to evolve! Richard chats with Aidan Finn about the on-going evolution of virtualization and the options available in Azure to use it. It's not just about Azure-hosted virtual machines any more! The conversation ranges over a number of Azure technologies in use today, including Active Directory. You need AD in the cloud to make your hybrid infrastructure work e...

So how has the Cloud changed Exchange? And how will those changes affect you? Richard talks to Tony Redmond about the on-going evolution of Exchange, primarily through Microsoft's cloud efforts with Office 365. Running Exchange at massive scale has changed the way Microsoft thinks about many of its products. Tony talks about what happens when an organization starts to move mail to the cloud - an o...

So how is IPv6 doing, anyway? Ed Horley knows! Richard chats with Ed about IPv6 adoption. And Ed delivers - turns out there's a lot more going on in the IPv6 world that folks know about. Looking at the stats on World IPv6 Launch, Ed talks about how Comcast has been quietly implementing IPv6 in their DOCSIS3 routers. If you're a Comcast customer, you maybe running IPv6 without even knowing it! The...

Mike O'Neill is back with some free tools you need to know about! Richard chats with Mike about his roster of go-to tools for a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. All of the tools are free to download and use. Mike starts out talking about The Problem Steps Recorder, a tool that lets you record every keystroke and mouse movement while using an app for playback in a web browser. Next up is a regular...

Paula is back - with stories of hacking her customer's systems! Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about her work as a penetration tester and what it has revealed about the common vulnerabilities for corporate systems. There are lots of simple things you can do to make your systems less vulnerable - starting with getting patched up! There's a lot of conversation about passwords and account restr...

Where did PowerShell come from and where is it going? Richard chats with Principle Software Engineer Lee Holmes about his experiences building PowerShell, going all the way back to 2003/2004 when Jeffrey Snover was trying to convince folks that Monad (the code name for PowerShell) was a good idea! Lee mentions a number of great resources along the way including AutoIt CmdLets and an Overview on Po...

How do you look at the potential security threats in your organization? Richard talks to Robert Hurlbut about threat modeling. Robert talks out talking about we all threat model in our day-to-day lives, after all, we put locks on doors and windows for a reason. But when applied to technology, things get more complex. Are you resisting specific attacks or casual hackers? How much security is enough...

Where is your DevOps practice at? Richard catches up with Gene Kim, the godfather of DevOps, to recap 2014 and talk about what DevOps in 2015 is going to be like. But you can't look into the future without being informed by the past, and Gene points to Puppet Labs 2014 State of DevOps Report as a way to understand the impact DevOps has had so far, and where things are going. The discussion also di...

How secure is your data? Richard talks to Simon Sabin about securing your databases and making sure you know they're actually secure. The conversation digs into various aspects of security including access control, restricting permissions and effective record keeping. Audits don't have to be the enemy, they're also the best proof that you've protected your data, and help point out when you haven't...

Does web performance just mean moving to the cloud today? Richard talks with Scott Forsyth about a variety of web performance strategies. Scott explains that moving to the cloud isn't the panacea that some folks think it is - any more than scaling out a web site ever was. There's still hard work to be done along the way, and it helps to have the tools to actually understand what's going on with yo...

Ready for the end of Server 2003? Richard chats with Eric Mills about the end of extended support for Windows Server 2003 - it had to come sooner or later! There are still millions of instances of Server 2003 out in the world, and they won't exactly spontaneously combust come July 2015, but the important bit is the end of tech support and security maintenance. The good news is that there are so ma...

Thinking about getting into Azure? Now is a great time! Rick Claus talks to Richard about how Azure continues to evolve making more entry points at lower levels of friction for a larger variety of customers. The conversation ranges over using Azure for disaster recovery, for application elasticity, building hybrid solutions with parts in the cloud and parts on-premise, and more! Want a VM in the c...

It's New Years Eve, time to get scared! Troy Hunt is back and talking about the evolving story that is the Sony hack involving North Korea. The show was recorded on Dec 22 2014, after hackers had threatened movie theaters with "9/11 style attacks" if they showed the movie "The Interview", which was deemed derogatory to the North Korean government. What happens next? Are we ente...

Holy cow, it's show 400! How did this happen? Richard invites his friends Paul Randal and Kim Tripp to have a little celebration, talk about what it takes to make a ton of podcasts. The conversation starts with a more personal discussion about what motivates Kim and Paul beyond SQL Server - animal rescue and exploring the world. Half through the show a fairly serious discussion about SQL topics......

Richard talks to Steve Thomas about AppV and AppX. AppV is short for Application Virtualization, a huge growth area of virtualization, providing tools to allow you to encapsulate applications to simplify deployment and configuration - or to not deploy them at all and allow them to run remotely. Steve talks about AppX, based on the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) that helps to define application c...

Richard talks to Sean Kearney about his work with PowerShell, including being one of the honorary Scripting Guys - including the fellow who makes the crazy Holiday Special songs and events. Sean digs into how PowerShell is penetrating all aspects of operations, including working in the cloud, specifically Azure. And PowerShell isn't just for migrations to Azure, it can handle a ton of administrati...

While at the SQLIntersection conference in Las Vegas, Richard hosted a panel discussion of amazing SQL Server rockstars including Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar to answer questions from the audience about SQL Server. Also listen in for comments and responses from some of the SQL Server team and a number of other great SQL personalities. Great discussions on replication, Always On, indexing,...

Richard chats with Tom Hollingsworth about the Software Defined Network (SDN) landscape and how it's evolving into a more open set of standards that interoperate well together. Of course, it's never that easy, but one aspect that has really grabbed ahold is whitebox networking - standard hardware with custom software. Normally the two are supplied by the same vendor, but that is starting to change...

How do you troubleshoot SQL problems? Kevin Kline talks to Richard about his process for diagnosing SQL Server, starting with Windows and SQL Server event logs, then moving through wait statistics, dynamic managed views and more. The focus is on making sure you're working on the right problem. Kevin also mentions Glenn Berry's awesome blog on DMV Queries, a resource you need to use! He also talks...