Short Tom Blog

SharePoint 2010 Servers Visio Stencil

2010-08-31T14:00:00.002+01:00

Many may know i have a passion for Visio. So much, I have just updated my Visio stencil for Trinity with the latest for SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft servers.

The stencil can be downloaded from here

The stencil now includes the following servers stencils all with branded logos:

SharePoint	Search	SQL	Miscellaneous
SP2010	FAST Search Server for SP2010	SQL 2008	Forefront TMG
SP2010 Foundation	Search Server 2010 Express	SQL 2008 Mirroring	Forefront UAG
MOSS 2007	Search Server 2010	SQL 2008 Clustering	Forefront Protection for SharePoint
WSS V3	Search Server 2008 Express	SQL 2005	ISA 2006
SPS2003	Search Server 2008		Exchange 2010
WSS V1			SMTP
Project Server 2010
InfoPath Forms

Happy Visio-ing!

SharePoint Search – What does “Indexing Performance” mean?

2010-01-12T13:09:00.001Z

When on client sites, I often get asked “What do the Indexer Performance settings actually mean?”

They are relating to the Office SharePoint Server Search service setting for the server running the Index role.

For those that don’t know, this is access via Central Admin >Operations > Services on Server. Select the Server doing the Indexing and select the Office SharePoint Server Search service.

The Indexer Performance setting affects the number of threads for Server running the Office SharePoint Server Search service in Indexing mode uses when crawling content.

Taken from TechNet, the following Table shows a what the indexer values actually mean.

Indexer Performance setting	Total threads available for crawling	Maximum threads available for crawling any particular host
Reduced	Number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server
Partially reduced	4 times the number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server plus 4
Maximum	16 times the number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server plus 4

Note - Crawler impact rules override the Indexer Performance setting, so you can throttle te search more if you want.

The setting you choose depends very much on your circumstances. Things like:

Server farm deployment (Single Server, small farm, large farm)
Server hardware Spec (specifically of your Index server)
Use of SharePoint (Collaboration, Content Browsing, etc.)

I have always took the stance of if you have a dedicated Index server, use it for that, so set it to Maximum. Single server deployments of MOSS, are more tricky. I would recommend Reduced, maybe Partially Reduced dependent on the use of your SharePoint server, e.g. Heavy Collaboration – Reduced, Medium Content Browsing -Partially reduced.

The TSUF Explained

2010-01-06T16:28:00.001Z

On a day to day basis, I'm troubleshooting SharePoint, SQL and Windows Server issues. Amongst some of my Trinity Colleagues, I have become well known for my 1st port of call fix for any issue, the TSUF.

Let me explain, TSUF stands for Tom Short Universal Fix. This actually means a server reboot, a power cycle, the 1 finger power button salute, “turning it off and on again”.

Having come from a support background, starting off on 1st line, I know the power of a reboot. Many a in the past time I have uttered the priceless words “Have you tried turning off and back on again?” and many times it has worked.

So now I am trying to spread the gospel of the TSUF outside my close circle of colleagues.

The TSUF Fixes Everything*

I would like to let people know that I’m a serious IT Consultant\Engineer and always carefully evaluate and investigate any issues before acting the appropriate manner. It just seems that many times the TSUF is applied and resolves the issue.

I have done some research and I can confirm that my studies have shown that when the TSUF is applied, 75% of the time it works every time*.

*not actually correct.

Where has “Services on Server” gone?

2009-12-15T13:30:00.001Z

On my last SharePoint deployment, I came across a very peculiar issue.

When I opened the SharePoint Central Admin (SCA) site, selected the Operations tab and the Services on Server link was missing. when I typed in the URL directly (http://SCA/_admin/Server.aspx) I was prompted with an access denied page. Strange as I had farm administrator permissions??? I also noticed other links were missing, like Outgoing e-mail settings.

Bit of background, the SharePoint environment as all built on Windows Server 2008 R2 with UAC enabled to the highest level, requiring username and password to run all UAC tasks.

So I worked out, I had just opened Internet Explorer and clicked a favourite to SCA rather than via the official Central Admin link (START > Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint 3.0 Central Admin).

This link runs PSCONFIGUI.exe to query the SharePoint Config database to see where the SCA is running and which is a UAC task. opening it via the official Central Admin link gave me all the SCA options again.

SharePoint and URLSCAN just don’t get along

2009-12-15T13:00:00.000Z

For my Latest SharePoint Extranet deployment, I had a lot of issues with basic SharePoint functionality which I have never had issues with before.

I could only upload a file up to 28MB in size, despite having the file upload limit set to 100MB (following these instructions from Microsoft - KB925083 & KB94481).
Office Integration didn't work (checkout didn’t work and “Edit in Office” opened the document in Read-Only mode, which is pretty useless for a for a collaboration tool).

My SharePoint site was publishing via ISA Server 2006, so made use of persistent cookies to enable the Office integration to work. I had tested this in my test environment and both the file upload limit and office integration worked as expected.

Whilst troubleshooting the issue in the live environment, one of my Colleagues realised a difference in my Test and Live environments. The Live environment web servers had URLSCAN installed. Another one of my Colleagues, tasked with performing server hardening of the live environment, had previously installed URLSCAN on my SharePoint web servers to secure IIS. When I was asked about URLSCAN before it was installed, having not heard of it, I did a quick bit of research which led me to the conclusion it shouldn’t cause any issues. How badly I was wrong :(

To resolve the issue, we removed URLSCAN from the web servers and accepted the risk. The SharePoint file upload and office integration worked as expected.

Lessons Learnt

SharePoint and URLSCAN just don’t get along, without the correct configuration and thought.
Make sure your Test environment exactly matches the configuration of your Live environment.
Take more time to research things you don’t know.

Exception from HRESULT: 0x80041054

2009-11-23T19:27:00.001Z

Issue

Following a fairly innocent reboot of all my SharePoint farm servers, all SharePoint site content was not displayed and I go the following error message.

Interestingly though, all the content under /_layouts/ was displayed with no issues. This made me think there must have been an issue with the content databases rather than the SharePoint servers themselves.

Reason

After much investigation (crawling through logs and internet searches), I determined (with the help of Matt Groves) that the SharePoint aware anti-virus (Symantec 5.1 for SharePoint) had stopped and left the VirusStatus code for the master page and several page layouts in anti-virus limbo.

When a virus is detected or when the service that connects SharePoint to the antivirus scan engine becomes unavailable, the antivirus scanner sets the VirusStatus code to a non-zero and non-null value. This makes SharePoint believe the files have a virus and won’t display it (pretty disastrous when its the master page!).

The scan engine became unavailable because the temporary licence for the Symantec 5.1 for SharePoint had expired. I believe the reboot stopped the scan engines from running, the license may have expired days or weeks ago.

You may also have an issue if you remove your SharePoint aware anti-virus.

Solution

Run the following SQL Query against your content database(s) to determine if they have have files stuck in AV limbo

SELECT * FROM Docs

WHERE (VirusStatus > 0) AND (VirusStatus IS NOT NULL)

(see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928169 for more detail)

This will return all files which SharePoint believes are viruses.

Enable your SharePoint aware anti-virus (I did this by applying a new license code to all the SharePoint servers). If you’ve uninstalled it, reinstall your AV, fix the content and follow products recommended removal process.
Run a manual AV scan on SharePoint using your SharePoint aware AV.
Run the SQL Query again to make sure no virus items are returned. if they are, run your manual scan again and try and determine if you have a virus.

SharePoint 2007 Visio Shapes

2009-10-22T16:00:00.000+01:00

A while back now I created a Visio Stencil full of MOSS 2007 Shapes. I have since added extra shapes. It now includes the following servers, plus the ability to create your own servers from the individual shapes.

MOSS 2007 servers
WSS V3 Servers
Virtual MOSS 2007 Server
VM Host Server
ISA Server
Search Server
SQL 2005 & 2008 Server
SPS 2003 Server

Download SharePoint 2007 Visio Stencil

Work will begin soon on the SP2010 Visio shape set. Watch this space.

My New Blog

2009-10-22T14:53:00.001+01:00

Hello,

Welcome to my new blog.

This is my second blog as my previous blog at sharepointblogs.com died for the second time in a year.

RIP Stop Collaborate and Listen

Watch this space for interesting information on Sharepoint, Music and Technology.

Cheers,

Tom

Visual Studio 2008 WSS extension 1.3 on Windows Server 2008

2009-09-22T11:15:00.000+01:00

I installed Visual Studio 2008 Extensions Version 1.3 CTP (VSeWSSv13_AMD64_Build-433.exe available from here) on my Windows Server 2008 with MOSS 2007 and IIS 7. The Visual Studio extensions gives you the solution generator used to create list and site definitions.

When I tried to open the Solution Generator, I got the following Error:

Error 2 The content type text/html; charset=utf-8 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (text/xml; charset=utf-8). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly. The first 1024 bytes of the response were: '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<title>IIS 7.0 Detailed Error - 500.0 - Internal Server Error</title>

<style type="text/css">

<!--

body{margin:0;font-size:.7em;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background:#CBE1EF;}

code{margin:0;color:#006600;font-size:1.1em;font-weight:bold;}

.config_source code{font-size:.8em;color:#000000;}

pre{margin:0;font-size:1.4em;word-wrap:break-word;}

ul,ol{margin:10px 0 10px 40px;}

ul.first,ol.first{margin-top:5px;}

fieldset{padding:0 15px 10px 15px;}

.summary-container fieldset{padding-bottom:5px;margin-top:4px;}

legend.no-expand-all{padding:2px 15px 4px 10px;margin:0 0 0 -12px;}

legend{color:#333333;padding:4px 15px 4px 10px;margin:4px 0 8px -12px;_margin-top:0px;

border-top:1px solid #EDEDED;border-left:1px solid #EDEDED;border-right:1px solid #969696;

border-bottom:1px solid #969696;background:#E7ECF0;font-weight:bold;f'. 0 0

Following some Googling (or should that be Binging) The reason was because Visual Studio 2008 Extensions Version 1.3 CTP uses WCF in the deployment process and you cannot run WCF in IIS 7 unless you do the WCF HTTP Activation, and the default configuration of Windows server 2008 doesn't provide this, so you can do WCF HTTP Activation by following these steps:

Go to the start menu Text box and type: Programs and Features.
Click on Turn Windows features on or off on the left panel

Click On Features --> Add Features:
Check HTTP Activation Check box under WCF Activation:
Install the Feature

Now the solution generator should open with no problems

Connecting SharePoint to a SQL Instance on static port

2009-08-15T15:30:00.000+01:00

If you are using a SQL server instance on static port (best practice for to secure SQL) there are a couple of things you need to do.

On the SQL server, in the firewall configuration, allow inbound connections to your static port.
In the SharePoint Configuration Wizard, you need to put "dbserver\instance,PortNumber" for the Database server name.

Redirect Page Content type Error – It don't like spaces

2009-07-08T14:00:00.000+01:00

Recently I had an interesting error issue with my company’s MOSS 2007 intranet.

My marketing department were trying to create a page to redirect to a PDF newsletter. The answer was the OOTB Redirect Page. Now this worked fine for all users with edit permissions, the redirect page came up for 5 seconds and then loaded the PDF file in the browser (as configure in Adobe Reader) as expected. Now all the other users who had read permissions tried to open the redirect page straight away they were displayed with a nice "page cannot be found" error message.

The redirect URL was set the http://intranet/marketingsite/Documents/Internal%20newsletters/Newsletter%20April%202009.pdf

After some investigation I worked out that the Redirect page content type does not like spaces(%20 in HTML encoding) in the file name or url.

Therefore I changed the PDF filename and Folder name to replacing the spaces with underscores ( _ ). Therefore the new url was

http://intranet/marketing/Internal_newsletters/Newsletter_April_2009.pdf

Problem solved

Remember, always test with the redirect page with a user account with read only permissions.

Internet Explorer 7 & 8 (64-bit) are only Level 2 Supported SharePoint browser with MOSS SP2

2009-06-05T13:00:00.000+01:00

Whilst investigating a Browser support issue for SharePoint I found out that the 64 bit versions of IE7 & IE8 are only Level 2 Supported Browsers. This means that all the functions performed via the browser with SharePoint will not work as designed in these browsers.

SharePoint items like the Date picker control, Rich Text Editor field and Datasheet view will not work as designed with the 64 bit versions of IE7 & IE8.

See the TechNet article for more details http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx

Cannot start the WSS Search Service & Office SharePoint Search not working – Same SQL & WSS\MOSS Server

2009-05-24T14:13:00.000+01:00

Cannot start the WSS Search Service & Office SharePoint Search not working – Same SQL & WSSMOSS Server

Problem

Running SQL and MOSS on the same server, I was unable to start the WSS Search Service and the Office SharePoint Search service was showing errors in the SSP Site. I had the following errors in my Event viewer:

Event Type: Error

Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search

Event Category: Gatherer

Event ID: 10034

Description: Could not access the Search service configuration database.

Context: Application '8f7d4cbe-8cb1-4d32-b406-1737af554479'

Details:The filename or extension is too long. (0×800700ce)

Event Type: Error

Event Source: Office SharePoint Server

Event Category: Office Server Shared Services

Event ID: 6482

Description:Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance (9d344ee4-eacc-4460-8dc6-bb66bd5ab982).

Reason: The path is not of a legal form.

Techinal Support Details:

System.ArgumentException: The path is not of a legal form.

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi.RunOnServer[T](CodeToRun`1 remoteCode, CodeToRun`1 localCode, Boolean useCurrentSecurityContext, Int32 versionIn)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi.AddApp(Role role)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.InstallGathererApplicationIf()

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.Synchronize()

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)

Reason

If you are running SQL and WSS/MOSS on the same server you will need to specify the Database Server, in the SharePoint Configuration Wizard as the NetBIOS name (Server01) and not the FQDN (Server01.Domain.com). Seems to be a bug in SharePoint as I always use the FQDN wherever possible

Solution

Disconnect from the SharePoint Farm (by running the SharePoint Configuration Wizard) and reconnect, this time using the NetBIOS name for the DB server. You will need to set the Indexer for any SSP's you have created and restart some of the Services on the SharePoint Server but you should get back up and running.