Prashanth Palakollu's Blog

Windows 8–Day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:11:00 +0000

The Windows task Manager in Windows 8 is completely revamped. I like the new look of the task manager. It is very intuitive and a single place to go to to debug all the issues. The task manager itself consists of 7 main areas:

Processes
Performance
App History
Startup
Users
Details
Services

The Processes tab nicely explains what applications and background processes are running. It also gives a graphical view of the current CPU, Memory, Disk & Network usage of each of the process. Right clicking each process gives you the ability to end the process, create dump file and look at the properties:

The Performance tab gives you more details on the CPU, Memory, Disk and Networking usage. You can also launch resource monitor from the link at the bottom of this screen.

The App History tab is completely new and is for tracking the performance of the Metro Styled applications.

The startup tab give the information about the applications which are started during system startup. You can disable the unneeded ones by right clicking the application.

The Users tab gives you an idea about the users logged into the system and also the resources used by each of the users.

The details table gives you information about the applications which are running.

The Services tab gives you an idea about the currently installed services on the system.

Windows 8–Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:30:00 +0000

I recently installed Windows 8 DEV preview and so far it’s been a nice operating system to play around with. I will try to document my findings as I use this new Operating System more frequently. After installing the Windows 8 OS with Developer tools, 64 bit version, I was trying to install Office 2010. The moment I ran the installer, it complained about 32 bit office components. Something like: “You cannot install the 64-bit version of Office 2010 because you have 32-bit Office products installed”. This was because of Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer which is 32 bit. I had to uninstall Power Point viewer to get Office 2010 installed. Power Point Viewer was installed by default. After installing Office 2010, the tools should be available to you:

Next, the one thing I don’t like at all is the restart option. In Windows 7, you could click Start –> Shutdown. But with Windows 8 , you will need to hover over the start button –> settings which would bring up the popup kinda thing on the right where you can restart the machine.

More later…..

Secure Token Service related error 800703fa

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:22:00 +0000

While configuring SharePoint 2010 Farms, sometimes while using Claims Authentication the below error used to popup every morning on the front end servers. The strange thing is that it would disappear after an application pool recycle.

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {080D0D78-F421-11D0-A36E-00C04FB950DC} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[System.ServiceModel.ExceptionDetail, System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089]]: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {080D0D78-F421-11D0-A36E-00C04FB950DC} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

If you look at the Stack trace, it becomes clear that the error is related to the WCF Service and in this case, it was related to the Secure Token Service (STS) application. To fix this error, open up IIS and navigate to the application pools section. In that are open the SecureTokenServiceApplication pool account and modify the “Load User Profile” property in advanced settings.

By default this property is set to False, change it to True and this should fix the error.

SharePoint 2010 Disable Mobile Page Redirect

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:00:00 +0000

When deploying SharePoint Farms, it is very important to consider the mobile aspects of using SharePoint also. Sometimes, it is very easy to miss this aspect. Out of the box, SharePoint 2010 provides few basic mobile pages. When you browse from a mobile, then you will be redirected to a different page rather than the regular publishing/wiki page you would see. You will be redirected to a page in layouts folder: /_layouts/mobile/mblwp.aspx.

If you are using a custom branded page for SharePoint 2010, then you may not want the users not to redirect to the out of the mobile page when browsing from their mobile. The easiest and supported way to do this is to add a web.config entry for the respective web application. The below entry needs to be added under the node <system.web>:

   1:  <browserCaps>

   2:   <result type="System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities, System.Web.Mobile, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/>

   3:   <filter>isMobileDevice=false</filter>

   4:  </browserCaps>

There are other ways to change this setting, specifically modifying the compat.browser file in the “App_Browsers” folder located in the application’s virtual directory. In here, you can disable the setting for a specific mobile. For example, to disable the redirect on IPhone, you would modify the isMobileDevice setting to false. By default it is set to true:

   1:  <!-- iPhone Safari Browser -->

   2:      <!-- sample UA "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0 like Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5A345 Safari/525.20" -->

   3:      <browser id="iPhoneSafari" parentID="AppleSafari">

   4:          <identification>

   5:              <userAgent match="iPhone" />

   6:              <userAgent match="Mobile" />

   7:          </identification>

   8:          <capabilities>

   9:              <capability name="isMobileDevice"                    value="true" />

  10:              <capability name="canInitiateVoiceCall"              value="true" />

  11:              <capability name="optimumPageWeight"                 value="1500" />

  12:              <capability name="requiresViewportMetaTag"           value="true" />

  13:              <capability name="supportsTouchScreen"               value="true" />

  14:              <capability name="telephoneNumberDetectionDisabled"  value="true" />

  15:          </capabilities>

  16:      </browser>

SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 Beta Upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:51:00 +0000

Finally, I was able to cleanly upgrade our SharePoint 2007 environment to SharePoint 2010 Beta (Database Upgrade). With 2010, it is very easy to track the upgrade process and know where the errors occur. Below is snapshot of the upgrade process…As you can see, I restarted the upgrade process multiple times and finally I was able to see the Succeeded message in the upgrade status page.

Here are few tips to get complete the upgrade successfully:

Always look for errors and warnings in the log files ( In the folder: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS\).
The log files are very detailed and give you information about the specific error which is occurring (Search for “error” or “warning” in the log files).
If there is a warning about a missing file, make sure the file exists, otherwise the warning will never go away. If you do not have the file then either clean up installation on your current farm or at least use a dummy file for the upgrade process (No warranties here)
Don’t worry about the error or warning count. Usually, the actual errors or warnings are approximately half of the shown count.
Make sure you have all the features deployed, otherwise you will get at least 2 errors for every missing feature.
During the upgrade process, you can always check for errors in the log file, stop the upgrade process, fix the errors and restart it over again. You do not need to wait for the upgrade process to succeed or fail before restarting the upgrade process.

Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.StateServiceLocalizedException: A Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service error occurred while processing your request.

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:06:00 +0000

After upgrading a SharePoint 200 7 application to SharePoint 2010, I was trying to access an InfoPath form which was hosted in a web part on a page. The following error showed up on the page instead of the InfoPath Form:

Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.StateServiceLocalizedException: A Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service error occurred while processing your request.

So, as the error was related to State Service, I wanted to make sure the state service was mapped to the web application.So, I went into the Central Administration site and followed the below steps:

Click on Manage web applications under Application Management tab

Select the web application in which the error is occurring

Click on Service Connections button on the Ribbon (the ribbon should be highlighted once you select the web application)

Now, on the popup, click on the checkbox next to the State Service - State Service Proxy option. Make sure the check box is selected.

Click Ok
Now, return to the web application where the occurred and refresh the page. The InfoPath form should now load without any errors.

SQL Server 2008 Configuration Manager WMI Error

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:44:00 +0000

Recently, I was trying out few configuration changes in the SQL Server Configuration Manager to find out the impact of each change. After sometime, I tried to open up the configuration manager but the following error showed up instead of the configuration manager mmc.

The error was “Cannot connect to WMI provider. You do not have permission or the server is unreachable. Note that you can only manager SQL Server 2005 or later servers with SQL Server Configuration Manager. Invalid class [0X80041010]”.

Upon searching, the below link explained a resolution for the same issue in SQL Server 2005.

http://blogs.msdn.com/echarran/archive/2006/01/03/509061.aspx

I followed the steps exactly as mentioned in the above blog post and it worked perfectly for SQL Server 2008 too. Here are the steps:

Open up command prompt using elevated privileges (Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008) or normally in Windows XP or Windows 2003.
Navigate to the folder c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared
Run the following command: mofcomp.exe "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared\sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof" (or just “mofcomp.exe sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof” )
You should see a similar output in your command prompt:

Parsing MOF file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared\sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof

MOF file has been successfully parsed

Storing data in the repository…

Done!

Below is a snip of the results….

How to find Orphaned users (Windows authenticated) in a restored database?

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:25:00 +0000

Very frequently, I need to restore databases from one server to another and sometimes it really gets difficult to find out the orphaned users in the restored database. So, how do you find the orphan users in the restored database ?

Well for SQL Server logins, you can use the below stored procedure:

exec sp_change_users_login 'report' and this will list all the orphaned sql server logins.

But, how do you find the orphaned Windows authenticated users/groups? Below is a simple script to find out these orphaned users in the restored databases.

select users.name
from master..syslogins logins right join sysusers users on logins.sid = users.sid
where logins.sid is null and issqlrole <> 1 and isapprole <> 1
and (users.name <> 'INFORMATION_SCHEMA' and users.name not in ('guest', 'dbo', 'sys'))

This can be used to write a script which will delete all the orphaned users or map it to the correct logins.

SQL Server 2008 Editions

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:23:00 +0000

Quite often, I need to look the features available in a particular edition of SQL Server and I end up searching for it all over the place. So, I decided to write this blog post with an idea of finding all the differences (@ the administration level only….for other difference please click on the link @ the end of the blog post) at a single place.

Features/Editions	Enterprise	Standard	Workgroup	Web Developer	Express
Number of CPU’s	OS Maximum	4 CPU	2 CPU	4 CPU	1 CPU
Memory	OS Maximum	OS Maximum	4 GB	OS Maximum	1 GB
Database Size	524TB	524TB	524TB	524TB	4 GB
x32 Hardware Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
x64 Hardware Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data Compression (Row and Page compression for both tables and indexes)	Yes
Resource Governor (for managing SQL Server workload and system resources)	Yes
I64 Hardware Support	Yes
Table and Index Partitioning	Yes
Parallel Index Operations	Yes
Parallel Consistency Checks	Yes
Scalable Shared Databases	Yes
Indexed views	Yes
Enhanced Read-ahead and scan	Yes
Mirroring	Yes	Yes (Single Threaded, Safety full only)	Witness Only	Witness Only	Witness Only
Online System Changes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Log Shipping	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Clustering	16 node	2 node
Automatic Corruption recovery from Mirror	Yes	Yes
Log Stream Compression	Yes	Yes
Online Indexing	Yes
Mirrored Backups	Yes
Backup Compression	Yes
Hot-add memory and CPU	Yes
Snapshots	Yes
Fast Recovery	Yes
Online Page and File Restore	Yes
SQL Server Change Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Merge Replication	Yes	Yes	Subscriber only	Subscriber only	Subscriber only
Transactional Replication	Yes	Yes	Subscriber only	Subscriber only	Subscriber only
Snapshot Replication	Yes	Yes	subscriber only	Subscriber only	Subscriber only
Heterogeneous Subscribers	Yes	Yes
Oracle Publishing	Yes
C2 Complaint Tracing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SQL Audit	Yes
Transparent Database Encryptions	Yes
Extensible Key Management	Yes
Hypervisor Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Database Migration Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Policy-Based Management	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SSMS Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Database Mail	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Performance Data Collection	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SQL Server Agent	Yes	Yes	Yes
Database Tuning Advisor	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Plan Guide	Yes	Yes		Yes
SQL Profiler	Yes	Yes	Yes
Performance Reports	Yes	Yes
Distributed Partition views	Yes
Automatic Query to index view matching	Yes
Unlimited Virtualization	Yes
CDC (change data capture)	Yes

If you would like to find more differences, you can find them here.

Outlook 2010 – Recall a sent message

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:56:00 +0000

Outlook 2010 has a nice feature called “Recall a sent message” . Using this feature, you will be able to either delete or replace the message in the recipients mailbox after the message has been sent (useful in cases where you forgot attachments or want to make changes immediately after the email is sent). But it only works if the message is unread. If the message has already been read, then you cannot recall it and you will get an email indicating that the recall has failed.

So, how do you recall the message ?

After an email is sent, go to the “Sent Items” folder
Click on the message you want to recall to OPEN it
Click on the file tab on the top left side

Click on the “Resend or Recall” option in the center pane

Now you can either “Recall” or “Resend the message”

Select “Recall this Message” and the following prompt will show up

At this point, you can specify either to “delete the unread copies of the message” or “delete and do a replace with a new message”
By clicking the checkbox “Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient”, you will get an email back indicating the status of the recall
Below is an example of failed recall which indicates that the message has already been read.

Clicking on the actions button on top menu bar will also open up recall options

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - February Release

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:26:00 +0000

It is a good time now, if you want to get started with VS 2010 as the release candidate has been made available. Also, the febraury release for the traning kit is available (this is huge - almost 600 MB). You can download the training kit using the below link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en

vSphere Client on Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:44:00 +0000

While installing vSphere client 4.0 on a Windows 7, I encountered the error, “The Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Second Edition installer returned error code ‘4113’ "" “.

As indicated by the error message, the error can be resolved by uninstalling, “Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable Package” from “Programs” in “Control Panel”

SharePoint 2010 Beta – Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb.ExcludeFromNavigation method

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:47:00 +0000

While upgrading to SharePoint 2010 Beta, the following error was thrown while trying to access upgraded pages:

Method not found: 'Void Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb.ExcludeFromNavigation(Boolean, System.Guid)'.

Looks like this method was excluded from Beta (not sure if there is a replacement method for this one). I will update this post if I find a workaround.

In MOSS 2007

In SharePoint 2010 Beta

SharePoint 2010 Beta Features

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:07:00 +0000

I have been waiting for so long to write this post and here I am…..So let’s get started and see what new features are available in SharePoint 2010 Beta.

Overall the basic idea of SharePoint(in general) is Content Management, Portal and Search integrated on a single platform. Few of the benefits of SharePoint are: Tight Office + SharePoint integration, Rich applications, Consistent User Experience, Navigation and architecture.

The main features of SharePoint 2010 are (this should be familiar to MOSS 2007 developers – like 6 pillars of MOSS 2007 ) :

Composites

Sandboxed Solutions
InfoPath Form Services
Enhanced Workflows

Sites

Single Infrastructure for Intranets, Extranets and Internet Sites.
Enhanced UI with Ribbon, Dialogs, Edit in Place and Ajax (Less page refreshes).
Office Client and Web App support (basic editing, high fidelity rendering)
SharePoint Workspace and Mobile (groove enhancements)
Support for XHTML, Multilingual

Communities

Collaborate using Wikis, Blogs and Co-Authoring
Organize using Tags, Ratings and Bookmarks
MySites Smart Profiles and Feeds
Browse Colleagues, Experts and Org

Content Management

Taxonomy, Workflow, Document Sets
Digital Asset Management
Handle Larger lists, Document Libraries
Content Types and Taxonomy across all the farms
Policy and Records Management

SharePoint Search

Standard and FAST Search
Experience, Relevance and Navigation
People Search
Scale and Flexible Platform
Search Results preview

Insights

Excel Services, SQL Server Support
PerformancePoint Services
Visio Services and Chart Web Part
Business Connectivity Services
PowerPivot (previously called Gemini)…100 M rows in excel and publish it to SharePoint – Two forms (SQL Server Power Pivot for Excel and SQL Server Power Pivot for SharePoint)

Coming to the End User, Social Networking and BI Enhancements, we have

Ribbon changes depending on context (different for a page and a library)
Edit in Place (with live preview)
Add Pictures directly without loading them into a library
Less page refreshes and more fluid
Checkout multiple documents
Document Sets – > Handles multiple documents as a single entity (flexible in handling sets)
Social Computing – > Activity Feed, Tag Cloud, Recent Blog feeds, Ratings,
All desktop applications open in Web now…
Find the right expertise people in your organization using People search and other social networking features
Subscribe to excel updates (rest based feeds) and directly link to live data.

Infrastructure Changes

On-Premises and/or Cloud
Web user interface revamp
Power Shell scripts (500+ cmdlets)
Resource Governors, Health Monitoring using Rules, Analytics, Logging
Upgrade is easier
Manage Farm remotely using Windows 7
Power shell – What if command is powerful
Central Admin – Web Apps, Service apps, Content DB, Health Monitor
OOB lot of rules for health monitoring (security, performance, configuration)
WSS 4.0 – > Microsoft SharePoint Foundation
Again Ribbon changes depending on the context here
64 Bit only
Run upgrade checker from SP2 before doing the upgrade

I will be posting more about MOSS 2010, as I keep finding out more interesting features about it…..

SharePoint 2010 Beta Installation Instructions

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:54:00 +0000

Hardware prerequisites

Component	Minimum requirement
Processor	64-bit, dual processor, 3 GHz
RAM	4 GB for stand-alone or evaluation installation 8 GB for single server and multiple server farm installation for production use
Hard disk	80 GB
Other	DVD drive

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.14).aspx

Below are the Server Requirements

Database: 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Web Front End & Application Server features: (The below step is also done by the MOSS 2010 Configuration Tool….Please feel free to jump to the next one)
- Web Server (IIS) role
- Application Server role

Software prerequisites for SQL Server 2008

· Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1

Installation Guide

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee667264(office.14).aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303420(office.14).aspx

I have few screenshots of the installation procedure here….

Please enter your product key on the next screen and click next.

Error: SQL Server at “servername” has an unsupported version 9.0.1399.6. The minimum required SQL server versions are SQL Server 2005 SP3 CU3, version number: 9.0.4220.00 or SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU 2, version number 10.00.2714.00

I did not have SQL Server 2008 SP1 installed (though it was mentioned in the Prerequisites) and after installing SP1, I was able to continue the installation.

Follow the wizard which opens up after the Central Admin is opened for the first time.

Make sure the above site is added to trusted sites (otherwise you will not be able to perform most of the operations in central admin.

While configuring the services, the below errors occurred:

The service application proxy "User Profile Service Application" could not be provisioned because of the following error: Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive. (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\Profile\client.config line 56)
Corelation Id: 3826b556-ee29-46b6-910f-b7179d58f030

To fix the above issue the WCF Hotfix (KB976462) for Windows Server 2008 R2 needs to be installed. The WCF Hotfix (KB976462) for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available from Microsoft Connect, and can be downloaded here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806

Download and install the above Hotfix. Once installed, restart the server after installation.

Manage Windows 2008 R2 servers using Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows® 7 enables IT administrators to manage roles and features that are installed on computers that are running Windows Server® 2008 R2, Windows Server® 2008, or Windows Server® 2003, from a remote computer that is running Windows 7.

Note: RSAT for Windows 7 can be installed ONLY on computers that are running the Enterprise, Professional, or Ultimate editions of Windows 7

RSAT includes the following tools and can be downloaded at the below location:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d

Server Administration Tools

Server Manager

Role Administration Tools

Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) Tools
Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Tools
Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Tools
DHCP Server Tools
DNS Server Tools
File Services Tools
Hyper-V Tools
Terminal Services Tools

Feature Administration Tools

BitLocker Password Recovery Viewer
Failover Clustering Tools
Group Policy Management Tools
Network Load Balancing Tools
SMTP Server Tools
Storage Explorer Tools
Storage Manager for SANs Tools
Windows System Resource Manager Tools

Download the tool and install it. Once installed navigate to control panel –>Programs and Features –> Turn Windows Features on or off. Select all or the required features in Remote Administration Tools section.

Change recovery model for all databases - sp_MSForEachDB

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Very often I need to change the recovery model on development servers from Full -> Simple as there is no need to backup the transaction data(because it is dev server). To accomplish this, normally you would right click a database node in sql server management studio -> options -> change recovery mode. But since I like to use t-sql directly, I decided to dig through the documentation to find out if there is a better way to do this and there is a definitely one.
In SQL Server, there is an undocumented(which means, this may change anytime without notice) store procedured named sp_MSForEachDB in the master database and is used to execute a single t-sql statement. The syntax is something like this:

sp_MSforeachdb @command1, @replacechar, @command2, @command3, @precommand, @postcommand

and each parameter is defined below:

@command1 is of type nvarchar and is the first command to be executed
@replacechar is of type nchar and is the character in the first command which will be replaced by the Database name. By default it is '?'.
@command2 is of type nvarchar and is an additional command which can run against each database
@command3 is of type nvarchar and is same as @command2
@precommand is of type nvarchar and is a command which runs before running any command on each database
@postcommand is of type nvarchar and is a command which runs after all the commands are run on all databases

Except @command1, every other parameter is optional. Enough of theory, lets start using it. Below are few examples on how to use the stored procedure:

Print all the databasename names

exec sp_MSforeachdb 'PRINT ''[?]'''

Check orphans

exec sp_MSForEachDB '[?].DBO.SP_CHANGE_USERS_LOGIN ''REPORT'''

Change db owner to sa

exec sp_MSForEachDB 'USE [?]; EXEC SP_CHANGEDBOWNER ''SA'''

Print the physical names and attributes of files associated with the current database

exec sp_MSForEachDB 'USE [?]; EXEC SP_HELPFILE'

Run DBCC CheckDB on all the databases

exec sp_MSForEachDB "DBCC CHECKDB ('?')"

and finally to change the recovery model to simple for al l the databases, first run the below command and then copy the output and execute it

EXEC sp_MSForEachDB 'PRINT ''ALTER DATABASE [?] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE''; PRINT ''GO'''

Thats all for now and maybe next time, I will have the examples which use the additional parameters.

Office 2010 technical preview

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:04:00 +0000

I have been using Office 2010 technical preview for a few days now and its been good so far. I have been primarily using Word and Outlook. Microsoft has introduced quite a few new features with this version. I tried to summarize few of them here, but there might be many more features which I am not aware of.

Outlook:

Conversations (similar to gmail threaded conversations)
Quick Steps, which groups frequently used actions and also enables one to create a customized action
Cleanup tool, which is used to remove any redundant messages in a thread
Many different types of views have been introduced. Email can be grouped by Date, Conversation, To and many more...
MailTips - To prevent common faux pas scenarios

Word:

Integrated screen capture tool (similar to snip tool in vista)
Better Photo editing capabilities

Outlook has been very stable, but the zoom tool does not function properly. Word cannot open/edit documents in SharePoint (this is really painful but heh, this is technical preview - so stop complaining). I guess that's all I have for today and will post later as I continue using this tool.

Windows 7, Configuring

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:02:00 +0000

Last month I took the Windows 7 Configuring beta exam (70-680). Well, the results are out and I did pass the exam.

Tip for anyone taking an exam : Always read carefully the "Skills measured" section on the official exam's site. The exam preparation will almost be done when you go through that stuff.

Here is link to the exam preparation site:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-680&locale=en-us

Also, if you need more resources, check out the links below:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/windows.aspx
http://www.techexams.net/forums/mcts-mcitp-windows-2008-general/42480-71-680-resources.html

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4 Beta out

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:52:00 +0000

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4 Beta has been released to MSDN subscribers...Check out the image below:

Time to pull up your sleeves and start testing it....

Error while importing a sitecollection in MOSS 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:20:00 +0000

Recently got this error message while trying to import a site collection in MOSS 2007:

FatalError: Failed to read package file.

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ImportDataFileManager.Uncompress(SPRequest request)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPImport.Run()
*** Inner exception:
Failure writing to target file
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.ExtractFilesFromCabinet(String bstrTempDirectory, String bstrCabFileLocation)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ImportDataFileManager.<>c__DisplayClass2.<Uncompress>b__0()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevatedWrapper(Object state)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.<>c__DisplayClass4.<RunWithElevatedPrivileges>b__2()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SecurityContext.RunAsProcess(CodeToRunElevated secureCode)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(WaitCallback secureCode, Object param)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(CodeToRunElevated secureCode)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ImportDataFileManager.Uncompress(SPRequest request)

Resolution: The error is because of insufficient space on c drive. Please clean up c drive run the import process again.

IE 8 NTLM Authentication on Windows 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:32:00 +0000

If you are using host headers to resolve the websites, then you might have seen the following issue with NTLM authenticated sites on IE 8. When you access the websites on a machine other than the one where it is hosted, you will be able to get to the sites.
Once you RDP onto the server and try to connect to the website, it will prompt for your windows credentials and will get an access denied message. This problem occurs because Windows includes a loopback check security feature that helps prevent reflection attacks on your computer(Probably some kind of security change has been made in IE8 related to this feature). Therefore, authentication fails if the FQDN or the custom host header that you use does not match the local computer name.

Resolution: Disable the loopback check

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

Loading this assembly would produce a different grant set from other instances

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:17:00 +0000

After installing .NET 3.5 sp1, all the MOSS web applications were working fine except for one. The following error was showing up:

Stack trace:
at System.RuntimeTypeHandle.CreateInstance(RuntimeType type, Boolean publicOnly, Boolean noCheck, Boolean& canBeCached, RuntimeMethodHandle& ctor, Boolean& bNeedSecurityCheck)
at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceSlow(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean fillCache)
at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks, Boolean fillCache)
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic)
at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture)
at System.Web.Configuration.Common.ModulesEntry.Create()
at System.Web.Configuration.HttpModulesSection.CreateModules()
at System.Web.HttpApplication.InitInternal(HttpContext context, HttpApplicationState state, MethodInfo[] handlers)
at System.Web.HttpApplicationFactory.GetNormalApplicationInstance(HttpContext context) at System.Web.HttpApplicationFactory.GetApplicationInstance(HttpContext context)
at System.Web.HttpRuntime.ProcessRequestInternal(HttpWorkerRequest wr)

Fix:
Just restart the application pool account associated with the erroring application and you be all set.

MOSS search access denied error after .NET Framework 3.5 sp1 installation

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:46:00 +0000

Recently we rolled out .NET Framework 3.5 sp1 on our MOSS Servers. During testing, we found out that while crawling the Sharepoint website the following error occurred:

Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository.

To fix the above issue, try the below steps:

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.(Try to re-run the crawl after registry change without restart. Sometimes it may not be necessary to restart.)

MOSS out of the box search error

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:33:00 +0000

Recently while configuring the out of the box search for a MOSS site, I encountered the following error : Your search cannot be completed because of a service error. Try your search again or contact your administrator for more information.

In order to fix the error, please make sure the application pool, the site is running under, has access to the search index. Here are the steps to follow:

First make sure the MOSS Search Service is running. Check the event viewer for error messages. If everything is ok, go to the next step
Find out the application pool account the site is running under(network service, local account or another account)
Go to Central administration -> SSP settings -> Search
Check the default content access and make sure it is the same as the above one