Internet on Planes?

I ran into this little gem and thought I should share it:

FAA Approves Wi-Fi for United

Business travelers will be happy to learn the sky's not the limit for internet access. Teaming with Verizon Airfone®, United Airlines has become the first U.S. carrier to receive Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval to install the necessary cabin equipment to enable wireless technology (wi-fi) devices on board a U.S. domestic commercial aircraft.

"Our research shows that connecting to the Internet is customers' most preferred form of communication to the ground, and this certification is a crucial step to bring this in-flight wireless access to our customers," said Dennis Cary, United's SVP Marketing. The date that customers may begin using wi-fi devices on United ultimately will be determined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the coming months.

More info here

Replication between SQL Server 2000 and Yukon (2005)

Lately I've been working on a solution to replicate data between two servers in remote locations. Server A is the master server running Windows Server 2000 and MS SQL Server 2000 while Server B is the subscribing server using Windows Server 2003 and MS SQL Server 2005 beta 2. I ran into a few snags and ended up investigating several methods to accomplish my goal. Here are the methods I looked into:

• Snapshot replication (pull and push models)


• Transaction replication (pull and push models)


• DTS Import/Export package building and MS Agents to run the package


• Yukon's Business Intelligence Development Studio to create or modify an existing DTSX package

I ended up getting all of them working (to one degree or another) minus the SQL Server Agents launching a DTSX package. For some reason, I could run the DTEXEC function and it would work. Launch that one with a SQL Server Agent and it would fail with some security thing. My end guess is that SQL Server (in a dev environment only) was running under the local system account instead of a named account and therefore mucked it up.

The sad part of all this research and investigation is that I ended up going with the first solution I looked into (snapshot push model replication). Here was the biggest problem I ran into with the snapshot push (from SQL Server 2000 to Yukon).

If you add the servers all in and request the subscription from Server B (Yukon), the server is added as a Remote Server on Server A. Everytime the connection attempt would occur, I would receive an error that I had to use the Management Studio or SMO to manage Server B (Yukon). I ended up killing the remote server entry and adding a Linked Server entry for Server B using the MS OLEDB for SQL Server Provider. I also had to alter a setting under the Publication's subscribers to alter the connection to use a named SQL Server Login (due to the System account usage for the SQL Server Agent process). This information from Cryer.com helped.

Anyway, I hope this can help someone else out there.