Many weekends of 'fun' ....

One caveat:

At my previous job, with SS2K/nightly LiteSpeed Diffs/EMC TimeFinder, we found that it produced mismatched LSN for DIffs, which couldn't be used for DR and...

8am-6pm with some lunch. When on call, you probably can add another 2-6 hrs nightly depending on how replication goes overseas( it is also Sybase\Unix), plus up to 30 hrs...

Sorry to hear that and I wish you good luck. AFAIR there is a website freelegaladvice.com (not 100% sure, but sure you could find it out). Ask your question there....

Just as example: Last year I created smth like EM+QA tool, using SMO, where I  excersized my creativity to add whatever I was thinking at that time....

Hello Mat,

And one more for richman_in2000@hotmail.com

TIA

as far as I remember ( back in 2002) there were some problems with cookies, so I created some encryption logic ( in asp) pass it to querystring and on...

If this is an asp question, they could do that ( if I remember correctly) either thru querystring or thru cookies...

Every time you install new server you can run custom script which will create a linked server on a fly. make sure you  choose strong password for that.

of course you can. create lite-weight sql side trace...it will have very minimal impact on your system

No error msgs in Event Viewer?

you have to tweak properties of w2003 msdtc to allow it to talk to w2000, selecting  "no authentication required"...

something like:

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX ('YourDB,'STATUS') AS 'Database...

..so you can use some kind of kill users stored procedures in the previous step...

actually it applied to SQL Server 2000 and not SS2005 (database mail-like in your case)

In my previous job, we have a monitoring server ( we were prohibited of using mapi in prod). So I made linked server between clustered server and monitoring server, so...