Archive
SharePoint 2007 Patching, SharePoint 2010 Site Usage Confirmation
A couple of patching issues have come up recently that are worth sharing.
Security Update for WSS 3.0 Patch, July 2012
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596911
We saw this coming through a customers WSUS system, and almost approved it but I decided to take a look at the KB article, the thing that caught my eye was .
After you install this security update, PSCONFIG may run automatically.
From bitter experience we know that this is a bad thing….the WSUS installer will not have any SQL permissions, so this can leave you in a position with different binaries versions on your servers to the schema versions in your databases, so either install by hand or use the PATCH_ARGS=runupgrade=no switch on the command line and deal with PSConfig in a more controlled manner.
SharePoint Site use Confirmation and deletion.
As from the June 2012 CU for SharePoint 2010 the sites deleted by the usage confirmation job will now appear in the recycle bin, so if your using site usage confirmation get the June 2012 installed.
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=149
SharePoint 2010 #RSS Feeds
One of the SharePoint configuration items that I tend to asked about is getting external RSS feeds to work, there are quite a few articles and blogs on the web that talk through specific problems, but I thought I would share my experiences with SharePoint & RSS.
So what is an RSS feed and why might we want to consume it, simply put and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a way used to publish often updated content in standard format that can be easily consumed. To find out if a site publishes an RSS feed, simply go to it and look for the RSS Feed symbol in Internet Explorer turn from Grey 
to Orange 
then just click on the feed button to view the feed address ( examples below use BBC News)
and then then view and subscribe to the feed.
Also if you are using Outlook and sync with the Common Feed List (the one that Internet Explorer keeps)
then the feed will appear in your mailbox as well.
What does all this have to do with SharePoint I hear you ask, in a perfect world you would go to your SharePoint site, edit a page, add the RSS viewer webpart, edit the RSS Feed URL property…
… and as if by magic the shopkeeper appeared, no sorry wrong story, as if by magic your feed will be displayed…
but more often then not you get the error below…
or something similar.
or if you are using the free and rather excellent Bamboo Solutions World Clock and Weather web part http://store.bamboosolutions.com/ps-55-5-world-clock-and-weather-web-part.aspx you might see the error below.
This is normally caused by one of 2 problems
Location of Proxy
Type of Windows Authentication used
Location of Proxy
If your SharePoint Web servers are located behind a proxy, they will need to know where the proxy is that traffic needs to go through, to do this updated your web.config for the site in question (if you have multiple WFE’s don’t forget to update each one)
Backup, then edit the <defaultProxy> section to make it look like this.
<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="false">
<proxy proxyaddress=”http://YourProxyServer” bypassonlocal="true" />
</defaultProxy>
Type of Windows Authentication
Once you have the settings about in place, the type of authentication in use at the web application level comes into play. If you are using NTLM, then you still may have a problem as your client side credentials will not be passed on your proxy server due the ‘double hop’ issue of NTLM so you can either set a bypass rule on your proxy to allow unauthenticated traffic out or configure your web app to use Kerberos authentication, once that is resolved your web parts should work as per below.
SharePoint never say “It won’t take long”
SharePoint – why is nothing ever quick ?
Recently I had to help out a client who was trying to restore a single piece of content from a backup. We had a backup copy of the content-db and the client also had a recovery farm we could use, so this shouldn’t have taken long.
The backup was over 200 GB, so the 1st problem was to find enough space on the DR farm to recover the content db, once we had enough space the backup was restored to SQL and we attached the content db to the recovery farm, but the Current Number of Sites, was 0, very odd…
I ran a couple of SQL queries on the content db to get some information about its content,
http://devdotnotes.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/common-sql-queries-for-sharepoint-content-database/
but SharePoint refused to show me any content, so we detached and reattached, moved to another Web-app and reattached but nothing appeared, and no errors were reported from the UI.
I took a look a the ULS logs, which was showing nothing, just the headings. An IIS reset and restart of the Tracing service kicked the ULS logs into action and we tried the reattach again, now we were getting errors in the ULS log.
The site named <Site Collection Name> and with id bc229270-86b6-4606-832e-a38c0e71058d was found in the content database <database name> in the database server <SQL Server Name>. However, the following error was reported while adding a mapping to this site to the configuration database. Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object.
Followed by
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint ‘PK_SiteMap’. Cannot insert duplicate key in object ‘dbo.SiteMap’. The statement has been terminated
This DR farm had all sorts of other Web Apps and content db’s attached, but I finally worked that another copy of the same db with a different name as attached to one of the other Web Apps, once that was detached we could attach our db, find the site, get the content out and make the client and end user happy 
Another day in the wonderful world of SharePoint !
Follow @NeilKing41
Managing Content Types in a Document Library
I was recently asked about the best way to manage large numbers of content types in a document library. The most simple way that I know of is to just add more document libraries and spread the content types among them, but what if your requirement is to only have one document library, in this scenario folders can help you.
When you set “Allow Management of content types” to Yes:
an extra item “Change New Button Order” is added to the bottom of the ECB menu for folders
This takes you to a “Change New Button Order” screen for the current folder not the document library.
You can now create logical groups of content types in separate folders, also as permission levels can be broken as folder level you can now create permissions at folder level and indirectly control who can use which content type in a document library.
** NOTE **
If you want to create a document library template or site template with content types in folders remember to tick the “Include Content”, button when you save your template or your folders will not be saved.
SharePoint 2007 6641 Errors : Logon Type 4
Recently I was asked to look at SharePoint 2007 install that was throwing 6641 “Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer” errors every few minutes and filling up the Application log.
We went through he normal steps of checking the service and SSP accounts, we did find that the Office Search Service had hung, but this wasn’t the problem, we checked various blogs on the web that seemed to point towards Kerberos being the problem, but this particular farm was only using NTLM. Thinking about the error “the user has not been granted the logon type at this computer”, got me thinking about logon types and failures, so a look in the Security log turned up these errors that were coinciding with the 6641’s in the Application log.
Logon type 4 is a Batch logon, the farm account was calling this but the User Name called was for a secondary SSP that we didn’t think was used. The best way to fix this would be to give the secondary SSP account the ‘Logon as a batch Job’ right via local security policy, so preserving the principle of least rights for a service account, unfortunately we couldn’t do this so a temporary measure we added the secondary SSP account to the local admins group and the 6641 errors immediately stopped.
An unfortunate side effect of the above that that we started getting the IIS WAMREG DCOM activation errors in the System event log while not a problem in itself we fixed those as well, steps outlined here for Windows 2003 / WSS 3.0 (as this system was), just make sure ALL your accounts are in the WSS_WPG group.
Once those steps were taken all 3 event logs were error free.
Documenting a SharePoint Farm
Anyone involved with the building / running / supporting of a SharePoint system will know how important documenting the original build configuration is.
If you build farms using the excellent AutoSPIntaller, then most of your work is already done as you have to plan things like your service accounts and database names for the inputs.xml file.
But what if you are called into look at a system that you know nothing about ?. in this case the equally excellent SPSFarmReport will come to your help.
The download zip file has versions for both WSS 3.0 / MOSS (32 & 64 bit) and SharePoint Foundation / SP2010 / Project Server 2010.
Once downloaded onto one of your servers with the binaries installed, simply run the appropriate executable under Farm account credentials, once ran you can delete the executable if needed.
The report output file is a nicely formatted HTML document that covers just about every single aspect of your farm configuration, this can be used to create your documentation guide, and as a timed snapshot of your configuration for future comparison.
SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans 