Surface Pro – Sleep oddities

No, this isn’t a post about me sleeping with my Surface Pro! My wife probably wouldn’t like that too much.

No this is a post about problems I seem to be having with this thing going to sleep. So, as a desktop replacement, it’s been pretty good so far. I’m still looking for a good way to split off the mini Display Port to two DVI monitors… I’m a dual 24″ monitor type of worker when I’m in the office. Using one and the Surface screen for work is not the best arrangement for me. But with that aside, I’ve been very happy so far.

I have noticed though that at times, when I go away from my desk, after hitting Windows Key + L to lock my screen, if I’m gone for more than just a minute or two, the SP seems to go into a deep sleep almost like hibernate mode – even when plugged into wall power. I’m a DBA, and I use SSMS all day long to interact with my SQL Servers… I try not to RDP to them to do work, unless I have OS level work to do. So, I might need to kick off a backup on a large DB that might take 30 minutes or longer to finish. I launch SSMS and run my TSQL command, all good. However, during the duration, if I lock my SP and then go to the rest room, and come back, I log back in, and my wireless connection is dropped… ergo, my backup has failed and I have to kick it off again.

It seems to me that perhaps there’s a proximity sensor on this thing, kind of like the XBOX Kinect camera that knows not only that I’ve locked my SP, but also that I’ve walked away, and it decides to override my power configuration and take a nap. That’s not a good thing… if I wanted to have to use a VDI type interface for all my work, I’d work off my Android phone with a Blue Tooth Keyboard, Mouse, and Micro HDMI to my monitor. If I can’t keep this thing running while on house power while I lock it, and go to a 30 minute meeting, it’s not useful as a workstation replacement. Off house power, I get it… but on it, let me decide – I am still a user, right Redmond?

Windows Updates affected SQL Server?

I had read about the issues with the SQL Agent “Is Alive” checks spamming event logs on clustered SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP instances… and since I have three sets of 2 Node clusters running multiple instances including 2012, 2008R2 and 2008, after reading about that a few months back, I checked my servers. None of them were spamming the logs. They all have (change that to HAD now that I’ve upgraded) SQL 2012 RTM, SQL 2008 R2 SP2, and SQL 2008 SP3. Not a one of them ever had the “dreaded” LooksAlive or CheckServiceAlive entries with Event ID 53 from [sqagtres]. Here’s one connect article that shows some more details and which versions are fixed with what CU’s. http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/737820/sql-2012-cluster-checkservicealive-spams-application-event-log

Anyway, so, none of the clusters in my environment have any history of Event ID 53 for SQL Agent. Last night, the System Administrator applied some Windows Updates (I don’t have a “test” SQL Cluster, but all these updates were applied on our Test SQL Servers prior to last night). After the Windows updates were applied, my event logs on ONE server started being spammed with the Agent Alive checks. WTF? I thought this was a SQL Agent bug?

Here’s the list of Updates applied last night. KB2799494, KB2789645, KB2251487, KB2790655, KB2538243, KB890830, KB2790113, KB2789642, KB2797052, KB2687441, KB2596672, KB2778344, KB2645410, KB2792100, KB2538242.

AgentAliveSpam

On Monday (since I’ve worked enough this damned weekend already), I’m going to go through the other two clusters and compare Updates that were installed, and base levels of SQL Server. Off hand, I think that both of the other Clusters were running SQL 2012 SP1 already.

Oh, another odd data point for me to consider… I was getting these LooksAlive entries in the event logs for the SQL 2008 instance!

Finally, a parting thought. Installing CU3 for SQL Server 2008 R2 at 2AM (or was it 3AM, damned DST!) on a Sunday morning, I really liked that I had to implement a work around to get the POS CU3 installed. Yeah, the old “Rename the C:\Windows\System32\perf-*-sqlagtctr.dll” file to allow the installer to upgrade your SQL Server bug. Thanks for that MS.

Surface Pro initial post

I got a Surface Pro through work, some there are thinking that this might be a good laptop refresh replacement asset. All in all we got almost a dozen and spread them out pretty good among IT. We have some Client Services folks, our “Executive Liaison Group”, our AD Administrator who does way too much with GPO management, myself the DBA, and a couple managers (I know!) with one. I am going to focus on using this as a complete laptop replacement so lets break for a paragraph about that!

I’ve had my trusty old Lattitude e6410 since starting at this company, so almost 3 years now. I had the last RC of Windows 8 on it in a dual boot mode, and when 8 RTM’d, I “side-graded” to that release. I say that because I have a blog post on how I did it, and it really generated a lot of traffic for me. I happened to answer another DBA’s twitter post about the possibility of “upgrading” from RC to RTM, he also blogged about it, referenced me and my post, and that got picked up in a Computer World article. That generated around 10k hits last year, and close to that already this year. Boring, I know, but I wanted to point out that I’m already somewhat familiar with the Win 8 “Metro” interface. Even though the Dell isn’t a touch screen, and I immediately found and installed Classic Desktop, I still played around over the past few months with Metro.

Surface Pro

So, on to the goods. My plan is to hopefully write a weekly entry about how the week was. Today I just bought a plain and cheap Mini DisplayPort -> DVI adapter from Office Max. It is an iLuv Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter with the actual note on the bottom of the box “* MacBook Pro and DVI Cable not included”!

MacBookProNotIncluded

It was $24.99, but available today, so I grabbed it. It just worked, I was a little concerned about it hanging with all the other elite and ultra-cool Apple gear, but it just works. I have an old 19″ Dell LCD that does 1280 x 1024 and it works, and looks pretty darned good. Next week, I should be getting a mDP -> Dual DVI adapter from Monoprice. Here’s the part an ugly little thing, but at $40, I don’t care. I’ll tuck it up between my two 24″ Dell displays at work, and no one will see it.

That’s when the testing will start in earnest. I consider myself a power user, as a sole DBA at this large company, I’ve usually got dozens of windows open and activities happening in the background. Whether it’s powershell scripts to gather SQL Server documentation, fixing Merge Replication crashes, doing new installs, running XPERF to trace down driver/hardware induced DPC’s… I’m doing a lot. The specs of this tiny little Surface Pro are probably better than my laptop. It’s also got a Core i5 (at least one generation older), 4 GB of memory, a 250GB spinning magnetic drive, and a crappy little display. The Surface is so much better, with a 128GB SSD, latest gen i5, a super-duper-spectacular display, and also 4GB of RAM.

I’ll work on some better pictures for next week… and clean the screen!!! eewwww!

🙂