If you need to install a SQL Server 2005 instance on a cluster, make sure that there aren't any remote connections to any of the other nodes. Otherwise, the installation may fail with the following error:
Setup failed to start on the remote machine. Check the Task Scheduler event log on the remote machine.
Please refer to this Knowledge Base article for more information.
I get this error every now and then and usually can't remember how to resolve it. Maybe I'll be able to find my own blog entry when I search on the error!
On Sunday morning, I got paged by one of our monitoring systems that we were low on free disk space on one of our production servers. The specific resource that was low on free disk space was our "Backup" mount point. Since I didn't think this should be the case for a few more months, I looked into each folder to see if any database backup was larger than it should be. That's when I noticed that our msdb backups were 6 gigabytes in size.
Typically the msdb database is larger than it should be due to backup history, but...