| Time for me to wax nostalgically. I remember the good old days when the only thing that really kept users from uploading files was the "Max Upload Size" setting in Central Administration. But alas, times change and things get more complicated. Now when files won't upload there's a whole laundry list of things to look at. And if you're like me, laundry lists are not your forté. Just ask my wife.
This came up this week as I was trying to upload my netcasts to my shiny new hosted web space. The rock stars at Rackspace have graciously agreed to host my media files. While I'm sure it's because they're great people, part of me thinks it's self serving so they don't have to suffer through the slow downloads of getting the files from my current setup. J
Once we got the site provisioned I started the task of uploading all of my previous netcasts to the new spot. That's when the hilarity began. I won't take you through every single foible, but here is a list of things to check if you're having problems uploading files to SharePoint:
- Web App upload setting: This is the most obvious thing, and the one you should check first. Go to Central Admin > Application Management > Web App General Settings (/_admin/vsgeneralsettings.aspx). You should always start there.
- While we're in the Web App general settings, take a look at your Web Page Security Validation settings. If you're uploading large documents across a slow connection, the page security could time out before the file gets up there. Increase that value as needed from its default of 30 minutes.
- While we're in Central Administration, let's make sure your file type isn't blocked. Go to Operations > Blocked File Types (/_admin/BlockedFileType.aspx) and make sure your extension isn't listed. This is a web app specific setting, so make sure you're changing the setting for the correct web app.
- Now we're going to hit some obscure settings. By now you should be using Windows 2008 (and it better be 64 bit, too!). With Windows 2008 came many improvements, including IIS 7. While IIS 7 includes all kinds of great improvements, it also quietly brought with it an upload limit. Regardless of what you do in SharePoint, IIS 7 out of the box limits you to around 30 MB uploads. KB 944981 covers how to increase this. However, the instructions aren't completely correct. Make sure you backup your web.config before changing it. My experience has been that you need to make the recommended additions between the </configSections> and <SharePoint> tag. Otherwise it'll break your web app. Also keep in mind this is a web app specific setting, so make sure you're editing the correct web.config.
- You can also change the IIS connection time out for your web app. In IIS 7 find your web app's site in the IIS Manager and click the "Limits" link on the right in the "Actions" pane. The default is 120 seconds. Feel free to make that much longer.
- Finally, since upload.aspx is an application page it has its own web.config settings. You can read how to increase its timeout settings in KB 925083. This is one I've had to do a lot.
That's about it. That last KB article has some other guidance on how to troubleshoot upload errors. This blog post is better, of course. J If you've had to do other stuff to fix file uploads, leave me some comments. I will cover this in more detail in next week's netcast. Thanks again to the fine folks at Rackspace for putting up with me.
tk |