SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

SharePoint 503 error

Working on a recent SharePoint 2010 install for a client, I came across a quite strange with the install.

As I had no direct access to the servers, I had to download all the Prerequisites, Binaries, Service Pack and latest CU and slipstream them all together to make a media set.

I ran the installers on both servers, got everything patched and working, opened the CA and Portal and site everything was fine, rebooted the servers and disaster !, nothing would work.

The CA site was giving 503 Service Unavailable error, checked in IIS manager and the CA and Token Service App pools were both stopped, so restarted them and reloaded the pages in IE, and WHAM 503 error again, checked in IIS and the app pools were stopped again.

Checked the SharePoint Windows Services and both the Timer and and Admin service were stopped, when trying to start all I got was the general windows message.

“The Service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion”.

The window Application log was stuffed full of SharePoint Foundation errors, but none of them seemed to shed any light, after several hours of head scratching and rechecking I finally out the problem in the Windows security log. Each time I tried to start a service or app pool there was a login failure in the Windows security log for the Farm account with a

“Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type for this computer”

A quick check in the local computer security policy showed that none of the service accounts had the “Log on as a batch job” or “Log on as a service” right, after a quick word with the local domain admin it turned out that these rights were being overridden by Group Policy setting, after adding the accounts to a specific AD security group and rebooting the servers all was well again, a more full explanation is here

 iPad BI issue

We have been working with a client getting the BI features running, one of the features introduced with the Dec 2011 CU for SharePoint was support for the iPad navigating a dashboard http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh697482.aspx

The issue we found here is that for some iPads the navigation would work properly and not on others. Further investigation showed that the iPad having the problem was running iOS6 Safari browser, not 5, a nasty little gotch and tricky to spot.

Happy SharePointing.