Cannot see wireless network woes ... resolved

I've had a pesky sort of problem for a couple months now that my CEO's computer can only see our wireless network but not our neighbors and couldn't see any in the city of Manhattan from his tower-high hotel room. Another contractor could see every other wireless network except ours; ditto for three new contractors that started this week.

But all the Dell Latitude D630s with (Dell Wireless 1490 Dual Band WLAN Mini-Cards) in the office could see all wireless access points including ours and the upstairs neighbors.

After many fruitless google searches, I finally extracted a clue.

The Cisco Aironet 1131AG in my office was only broadcasting over 802.11A, whereas the wireless network adapters of various makes and models including an Intel Wireless Wifi 4965AGN in a Sony Vaio and an undocumented card in an Acer were only listening on networks other than 802.11A.

So did two things:
I enabled 802.11G on the Cisco Aironet.

Then on the CEO's Vaio, I went into the properties of the wireless adapter
On Vista - Network and Sharing Center > Manage network connections > right click on the wireless adapter, select properties > select Configure > Advanced
in the list, look for something that goes by various names like Wireless Mode, Band Preference, or just search through the list until you see something that makes you choose whether you want 802.11 a/b/g or some combination.

On the Vaio, I could choose 802.11a/b/g and voila! CEO's vaio could suddenly see everyone's WAPs. I haven't tested on the other machines, but I'll repost if it doesn't solve the issue.

Issue deleting MS SQL Server Maintenance Plans and Jobs

I was contemplating running around in circles, as that's what my brain was doing trying to figure out this inane error with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Maintenance Plans and associated jobs (subtasks).

I had a brand new install of SQL server and used the Maintenance Plan wizard to create a series of jobs for full backup, differential backup, and transaction log backup.

Seemed to be working just fine, until someone else changed the 'sa' password and all the jobs failed left right and center.

It took me a while to figure out that was the cause, and the last day to figure out how to delete a maintenance plan and associated jobs once the sa password was changed. Couldn't delete them manually, I got an error saying the login failed for user 'sa'.

I could delete all but one of the subplans by listing them first under maintenance plans, but one could never be deleted.

This turned out to be the major error:

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)
------------------------------
The DELETE statement conflicted with the REFERENCE constraint "FK_subplan_job_id". The conflict occurred in database "msdb", table "dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans", column 'job_id'.
The statement has been terminated. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 547)

And at long last, after many, many searches, I found this marvelous post on how to manually delete the jobs and maintenance plans with TSQL code:
MS Forums
and this one, which was inordinately useful:
sql-server-2005-delete-maintenance-plan-error

And here's pretty much what I did in TSQL to delete the subplan and the maintenance plan 'SystemDB-MaintenancePlan':

USE [msdb]
declare @job_name varchar(100)
set @job_name = N'SystemDB-MaintenancePlan.Subplan_1'

delete sysmaintplan_log
FROM sysmaintplan_subplans AS subplans INNER JOIN
sysjobs_view AS syjobs ON subplans.job_id = syjobs.job_id INNER JOIN
sysmaintplan_log ON subplans.subplan_id = sysmaintplan_log.subplan_id
WHERE (syjobs.name = @job_name)

USE [msdb]
declare @job_name varchar(100)
set @job_name = N'SystemDB-MaintenancePlan.Subplan_1'
delete sysmaintplan_subplans
FROM sysmaintplan_subplans AS subplans INNER JOIN
sysjobs_view AS syjobs ON subplans.job_id = syjobs.job_id
WHERE (syjobs.name = @job_name)

declare @job_name varchar(100)
set @job_name = N'SystemDB-MaintenancePlan.Subplan_1'
delete
from msdb.dbo.sysjobs_view where name = @job_name

delete
FROM msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_plans
where name = 'SystemDB-MaintenancePlan'

other commands I find useful:
select * FROM sysmaintplan_subplans
select * FROM sysmaintplan_plans

Happy deleting! Thanks so much Gedzuks!