3/1/2010The last couple of years have been very good to me. A couple of weeks ago another cool opportunity presented itself. Hilton Giesenow of The Moss Show asked if he could interview Shane and I for his show. I was flattered. Anyway, it went up a couple of days ago. You can get to it from here. Enjoy, and let Hilton know how much you liked it. J
tk 2/25/2010You don't have to look very hard to see the impact online sales have had on brick and mortar stores. CompUSA is out of business, and even here in Ames the Hollywood Video is closing down, arguably because of competition from services like Netflix. The brick and mortar stores are struggling, no doubt about it. Being an online kind of guy I like to order things online. The selection is nice, the prices are nicer. The fact that I don't have to put my pants on is just icing on the cake. A week ago I got a Droid from Motorola. Not a bad phone and I'm getting used to it. Yesterday I decided to buy the media dock for it. I was more impatient than cheap, so I wanted to pick it up locally. I went to Verizon's site and found it. Their site knew where I was, but didn't show me if it was available for local pickup. Kind of annoying, but I'll let it go. I click the "Find Store" link, get the number for our local store, and dial it. Instead of a human I'm answered by a phone tree. It offered me a bunch of options like get information on my account, other useless stuff like that. There was no option for "see if your local store has something in stock." I ended up picking an option like "talk to a representative about a new line" just to get a human. The whole experience was not what I expected when I dialed a local number for my local store. The guy confirmed they had the media dock in stock. Woo Hoo!
Today after lunch I swing by the store to grab said dock. I was a little excited. As soon as I stepped in the door I was not greeted by a person, but by a rope and a kiosk. In order to step foot into the store I had to "check in." All I wanted to do was take a box off the shelf and pay for it. Nothing else. At this point I was annoyed. There were three people behind the counter, none seemed interested in me, nor were any of them helping anyone in the store, at least not directly. They were all typing furiously with their heads buried in monitors. I looked up and asked the closest guy if I really needed to check in. He explained I did, because there were three people ahead of me. Ahead of me for what??? I just want to take something off the shelf and pay for it! I wanted the media dock though, so I started the check in process. I touched the kiosk to start the check in process. Then I clicked the "Begin Checkin" button. The next screen was it for me. Instead of getting something like "your number is 26" I got form to fill out. Are kidding me?? It wanted me to fill out my full name with separate blanks for First and Last names. All this just to buy a media dock! No way!
So I left. They made it entirely too much work to buy the dock at their store. I ended up buying the dock online. That's right Verizon store at 806 South Duff in Ames Iowa. Your ridiculous check in policy cost you a customer. Not only did I not buy the media dock at your store, I don't plan on buying ANYTHING at your store. It's too much hassle.
tk 2/4/2010As a SharePoint consultant I get to see a lot of things about SharePoint that bug people. This blog post is dedicated to one of those SharePoint annoyances, a GUID at the end of the Central Admin content database.
If you do a regular, wizard driven configuration of SharePoint Central Admin is created. This is the part after the bits are installed, but before SharePoint is configured. The Configuration Wizard runs and if it's a new farm it sets up the farm. Part of that setup is creating the Central Admin web app, and its content database. Web apps in SharePoint can have many content databases. When you add a content database to SharePoint it checks to see if the database exists. If it does, then SharePoint adds the existing database to your web app. If the database doesn't exist, SharePoint creates it, then adds it to the web app. This is important when the configuration wizard creates the Central Admin web app. If SharePoint used a well-known name for the Central Admin content database, like "Admin_Content" then if that database already existed, the existing one would get mounted. This could happen since a SQL instance can hold the databases for many SharePoint farms. To keep this from happening the configuration wizard throws a random GUID at the end of the database name. For some folks, having a GUID in a database name really cheeses them off. To prevent this, you can script the configuration of your farm with a daunting combination of psconfig.exe and stsadm.exe commands. It's not for the faint of heart. Until recently when a customer took exception to the GUIDed database names I was able to tell give them the explanation you just read, explain to them that no other databases will be GUIDed against their well, and we move on.
Recently a customer voiced that same concern, and we had the same talk. Unfortunately they had some 3rd party software that didn't like the GUID in the database name. All my sweet talking was no good. I was forced to find a solution. It took a couple of minutes, then it occurred to me, Central Admin is just a site collection, so I can handle it like any other site collection. I ended up creating a 2nd content database for Central Admin and giving it a more reasonable name. Then I used STSADM's mergecontentdbs operations to move the Central Admin site collection to the new content database. Then we were free to dismount the GUIDed database in Central Admin and delete it in SQL. That made for a happy customer. Below are the steps I took. There's not a man, woman or child alive that doesn't like screenshots. So I've added lots of them to show what I did.
Here's where we start:
Here's how it looks in Central Admin:
First step was to add a new content database to move the site collection to.
Here's the next step
Now we have two content databases:
Next is a screenshot of the next few things I did on the Command Prompt to move the site collection. The line outlined in red is the actual command that moves the site collection.
I used "stsadm –o mergecontentdbs" with the full move option.
Now I can go into Central Admin and delete the GUIDed database. Central Admin will look like this:
There is one final, satisfying step left:
(And the crowd goes wild!)
Hope that helps clean up some SQL instances.
tk 1/7/2010This blog post is the heartwarming tale of two warring factions putting their differences aside and working together for a common good. That's right, devs and admins, hand in hand, figuring out this beast we both love called SharePoint.
A couple of days ago I got an IM from a buddy of mine, Dan Attis. Like many of us he's been playing with SharePoint 2010 pretty heavily and that day he had poked it pretty hard and it didn't like it very much. It decided not to work anymore. Dan didn't want to rebuild his VM. Heck, he didn't even want to reinstall SharePoint. So his question to me was essentially, "Is there any way for me to reset SharePoint, without reinstalling it?" Now, keep in mind this was a test dev VM he was working on, it wasn't a production environment of any kind. Because of that I figured I had some latitude. The first thing that came to mind was just creating a new ConfigDB. That resets SharePoint. It's a pretty extreme measure though. I almost felt dirty suggesting it. I told Dan to run the SharePoint Config Wizard and remove the server from the farm. Then run the SharePoint Config Wizard again and instead of connecting it to an existing farm, create a new one. The important step is to give the new ConfigDB a different name than the old one. The server will now essentially be reset with a fresh version of SharePoint. Dan walked through the steps and it did exactly what he wanted. Now he was free to do whatever horrible, torturous things that devs do to SharePoint. Another dev/admin cooperation success story.
Here are screenshots of what it looks like:
The normal config wizard welcome screen.
This is the old, bad farm information. Make sure when you rerun the wizard you use a different name for your ConfigDB than what is listed here.
Click yes, this is exactly what you want to do.
That's all there is to it. The SharePoint binaries are still installed, but it's no longer configured. If you go into IIS you'll notice all your SharePoint related sites have been removed.
Now rerun the Config Wizard and create a new farm.
Click Next.
Click "Create a new server farm."
On the next screen input your farm information. Make sure your Database name is different than what your old ConfigDB was.
You'll have to set up a new farm passphrase, since this is a new farm.
You'll also need to set up Central Admin, since the previous Central Admin instance was removed when the server was removed from your old farm.
That's all there is to it. Look over your settings and hit Next.
Now, fairly quickly you'll have a fresh new SharePoint farm to use, or abuse if you're a dev like Dan.
tk 1/4/2010In the last week I've had two separate incidents where KB973917 was installed on a server and it either prevented a formerly working SharePoint farm from working, or it prevented a clean machine from getting SharePoint installed. I wanted to add a blog post to the chorus of blog posts already out there on this, to make it easier for folks to find.
The first problem I encountered was a MOSS farm running on 64 bit Windows 2003 server. It had been happily running for months. Now all of a sudden whenever someone tried to hit it with a web browser they were met with an "Internal Server Error" and the Application Pool would crash with "Unknown error." The app pool would restart, but would crash again as soon as someone hit it. This was with all web apps, including Central Admin. To make things more confusing, SharePoint itself seemed to be fine. I could use STSADM to do anything STSADM does and it worked great. I could enumerate sites and webs, anything. IIS seemed to be broken, not SharePoint. I asked the customer what they had changed, and they answered, "Nothing." J In their defense, it had been over two weeks since they had applied any patches. Our friend KB973917 was in that list though. I had seen something go across Twitter about a patch breaking SharePoint, but I hadn't paid much attention. I looked through all the patches that had been installed in the last round and started searching on Bing for "<patch> SharePoint." Searching for "KB973917 SharePoint" yielded me a bunch of hits with titles that suggested this might be what I was looking for. Particularly KB2009746 hit the nail on the head and described exactly what I was seeing. Contrary to what the KB said, I did uninstall the evil KB973917, and that alone didn't fix the issue. When I reinstalled SP2 for Windows Server 2003 though IIS started working again, and therefore SharePoint was happy. I probably could have just reinstalled SP2 and been fine.
Today I stumbled onto another problem that was caused by KB973917. I had a fresh build of Windows Server 2008 and I was blessing it with an install of MOSS 2007. SP2 for MOSS was built in. The install went very quickly until it got to the "Applying Updates" part where it installs the patches that are slipstreamed. This went very, very slow. After 35 minutes it crashed, giving me the "Windows is looking for a solution" message box. This was odd. I had heard of something similar to this (though not identical) before, and it was caused by the security on the box being very tight and SharePoint not being able to write to places in the file system and Registry that it needed to. I removed all GPOs that had been pushed down, and disabled UAC and tried again. Same failure. There were no clues in the event log. The SharePoint installer log was very little help, it really only showed this:
Executing command path: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe', args: 'timeout=2950 MsiPath=msxml\msxml6.msi'
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Catalyst execution finished: 01/04/2010 12:10:32. Return code: 30008. Exception caught: CommandFailed.
PERF: TickCount=4334578 Name=RunSetup Description=End function
There was my 35 minutes, 600000 milliseconds (10 minutes) at a time. I did some searching and nothing really jumped out. At this point I wondered if something was wrong with the machine, so we jumped over to another machine and tried to install. Same problem. Three attempts, three failures. I tried a few more things to no avail. Almost as a joke I suggested to the customer to uninstall the evil KB973917 and install SP2 for Windows Server 2008. I suggested that only because it seemed the last part of the SharePoint install was trying to configure IIS on the box, and KB973917 broke IIS on the Windows 2003 box I had seen the week before. We did it and SharePoint installed successfully. Another SharePoint casualty of the much maligned KB973917.
I don't completely understand why this patch is wreaking such havoc on IIS and SharePoint. I want to get this post out in case anyone else is having weird problems and can't quite seem to stitch it all together. I've wasted too many hours on this bugger myself, hopefully I can save you folks an hour or two. J
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My latest book has been released. I present... Inside SharePoint Administration. Shane Young, Steve Caravajal and I packed every trick and tip we know into this little number. You can order it from Amazon, or wherever you buy books.
Enjoy,
tk
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Ever wonder what a SharePoint smarty does in his free time? We write blog entries and books. One of the books I was fortunate enough to work has hit the shelves. You can pick up Real World SharePoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences From 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs on Amazon . The book is filled with all kinds of great information on a wide variety of SharePoint aspects. There's something in there for admins, developers and even end users. As is in the Wrox tradition, all of our pictures appear on the cover. Here's what to look for:
Click for a full size picture
If you buy books at brick and mortar stores, please ask them to carry it. My baby's gotta eat!
After you grab the book head over to the Wrox forums or post here and let me know what you think.
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