Take for example, you install the bits for the service pack 1 upgrade. The first thing, of course, is that you need to finish installing those bits on all of the servers in your farm. But then after that you need to run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard (or run psconfig.exe) to upgrade the installation. I recommend running the wizard first on the app server that serves your Central Administration site. But you really need to wait until it’s finished before running the config wizard on your next server. If you do rush ahead, it won’t let you. I tried it just to see what would happen. When I started the second config wizard in the process, the screen stayed just like this until the first server was finished with the wizard.

So it looks like there is a flag that is checked before it starts. And if one server already is locking up the configuration, the next one will not start until the first is finished.

Technorati Tags: Install, psconfig, SharePoint

For those that may find it interesting, here is a list of scope-growing factors that can add major complexity to a simple SharePoint implementation:

• Incoming email functionality
• Non-AD profile sync connections
• Write-to AD functionality for profile-sync (as opposed to reading from Active Directory only)
• Forms based authentication or claims authentication (instead of old-school Windows auth)
• Search content sources other than the local SharePoint content
• FAST Search (instead of regular SharePoint search)
• PowerPivot
• Project Server
• Team Foundation Server
• SQL Reporting Services
• Migration or upgrading of content from other SharePoint farms
• Publishing service applications to other SharePoint farms
• 3rd party add-ons

Technorati Tags: consulting, SharePoint

But this time I had a horrible time doing it. I don’t know if these factors had anything to do with it but my situation included the following noteworthy factors:

• Brand new SQL 2008 R2 CU7 Active/Passive clustered SQL environment with a named instance
• SQL is configured to use dynamic ports only on TCP/IP
• My SharePoint 2010 hosts is configured to connect to use SQL client aliases to connect
• SharePoint 2010 was installed with media that was slipstreamed with service pack 1 and the June 2011 CU

Here is the command I was trying to use:

psconfig.exe -cmd configdb -create -server MYSQLAliasName -database FancyPrefix_SharePoint_Config -dbuser Domain\SPfarm -dbpassword SomePassword -user Domain\spadmin -password SomePassword -admincontentdatabase SP_FTIAP_Admin_Content –passphrase MY_passphrase

The error I got in command-prompt window was:

The configdb command is invalid or a failure has been encountered.
Cannot connect to database master at SQL server at MYSQLAliasName. The database might not
exist, or the current user does not have permission to connect to it.

Not helpful. After verifying that I was able to connect I turned to look at the database server. But on the SQL server there was a more descriptive error in the SQL Logs:

Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 6.

Message
Login failed for user ‘Domain\SPfarm’. Reason: Attempting to use an NT account name with SQL Server Authentication.

So at first, I tried to configure SQL to accept Windows Authentication only. That didn’t help, after restarting the services, future attempt got me this error:

Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 58.

Message
Login failed for user ‘Domain\SPfarm’. Reason: An attempt to login using SQL authentication failed. Server is configured for Windows authentication only.

So no dice. I kept searching and trying variations. Including altering my syntax to use the “username@domain.local” style but nothing worked.

I never did figure out how to get past the problem. I ran out of time and decided to go around the issue. I created the farm using the configuration wizard and then followed Cuban Pete’s instructions to change the name of the Admin Content database, which is simply the PowerShell commands needed to change the name in SharePoint and then when to go into SQL Server Managment Studio and change the actual database name.

Technorati Tags: command-line, psconfig, SharePoint

I was wrong. It went well. And he had a working 2010 farm with all the basic service apps in under 2 hours.

Here are some points to remember when doing a pilot (or any kind of) install:

• Create all of your service accounts ahead of time. (You DO use service accounts, right??)
• Give the setup account admin rights on the SQL servers too and not just the SharePoint servers (this wasn’t necessary for MOSS). If it’s SQL 2008, make the setup account a sysadmin in SQL. (The farm account still just needs “secadmin” and “dbcreator” roles in SQL.)
• Remember to turn off the “Default Web Site” in IIS. Also change the bindings so that the port is something other than 80.
• Get a static IP
• Don’t forget to disable the loopback check.
• If your SQL server hosts multiple projects and not just your SharePoint farm, consider using some kind of prefix in front of the database names as you are setting up SharePoint. For example, if you put “SP2010_” at the beginning of all the SQL databases you use, your SharePoint databases will be nicely bunched together when you use SQL Management Studio
• When setting up profile synchronization to Active Directory, try to only select OUs that have actual user accounts in them. Avoid the OUs or containers that have service accounts. Nobody wants to store 150+ profiles for service accounts.

Technorati Tags: consulting, IIS, security, SharePoint, working

Stuff that could make a difference:

• For Incremental crawls (of regular SharePoint content)
  • Farm architecture
    • Is the indexer (and/or the target server) host separated or doing other tasks?  If it’s doing other tasks, you must take into account the kind of load it’s under and when that load is high and low.
    • Is the database host(s) scaled in a way that running crawls don’t impact user traffic?
    • What’s your “Indexer Performance” level set to?
    • How fast does your indexer crawl?  (i.e. items per hour or items per day)
  • Content
    • How many items are currently (or at the time of go-live) in your index?
    • How frequent does it change?
    • What kind of content is it?  Big pdfs and Word docs?  SharePoint lists and news posts only?
    • What’s the anticipated growth rate of the content?
    • Are there any documented requirements for search freshness?

• For Full crawls (of regular SharePoint content)
  • Pretty much the same stuff as above
  • Can you get away with doing incremental only?  (See this TechNet page in the “Reasons to do a full crawl” section for info about when you must use full crawls instead of incrementals.)

• For profile import
  • Number of exposed profiles
  • Configuration of Mysites and number of mapped properties
  • Can AD handle the load?
  • Is the SSP server doing other roles?
  • Profile freshness requirements

Real life example:

The my current client projecthas pretty fast servers, 14+ million items in index, 40,000 users, and 4 WFEs.  We would be doing incremental crawls only if we can get around a technical issue.  Full crawls take about 4 days. (a bit over 4 million items crawled per day)  Until the problem is fixed, we have been doing full crawls once a week but we really can’t keep it up.  Incremental crawls happen nightly and are most often done before the work day begins. (This is unless users used Explorer View to move or change millions of items the previous day.)

As for profile imports, since MySites are not exposed for all 40,000 users, profile imports happen very fast.  Incrementals happen in under 20 minutes and fulls finish in a couple hours on Sunday mornings.  However, this summer we will expose SP 2010 mysites for all 40,000 users with some fairly moderate custom mappings.  When that happens we will be putting into some serious tuning focus to make sure that it happens efficiently. 

Here and here are some good tuning tips for MOSS… most are probably relevant for SP 2010 also.  Also, the “Inside the Index and Search Engines: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” book has been pretty helpful.

Technorati Tags: consulting, MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint Search

I’m having one of those days.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint, working

BUT, in R2 of Server 2008, the most important one of these is locked down and won’t let you change it.  If you try to change the “IIS WAMREG admin Service” in R2 you’ll see a grayed out screen like this:

Even if you’re a full admin, you’re still locked out.  It turns out you have to into regedit and give yourself permissions to the corresponding registry key just to be ABLE to modify it in DCOM.  I found full instructions to fix it up in this blog post: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Fix-the-SharePoint-DCOM-10016-error-on-Windows-Server-2008-R2.aspx

I had to pass this on.  Because I we’ll be running into this a lot as we get involved with MOSS installs on Server 2008 R2 servers.

Technorati Tags: security, SharePoint

Someone needed to move a Document Library from one site collection to another one.  The only viable way to do this is to go to the library settings for that doc library and export it as a list template with content.  When I did that I received the in-SharePoint error saying:

“The list is too large to save as a template. The size of a template cannot exceed 10485760 bytes.” 

This poses a problem because the only other (non third-party tool) way to do this would involve exporting a copy of the original site and then importing it into the destination site collection so that I would be able to use Site Manager to move the list.

Well it turns out there is an undocumented property that can be modified to change this.  Run the following command to see what your farm is currently set to:

stsadm.exe –o getproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size

Chances are the reply will be “<Property Exist=No" />”, which means that you are using the default setting of 10 MB as your limit.  You can set the limit to something higher by using the “setproperty” switch.  For example:

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size –propertyvalue 500000000

would increase the limit to about 60 MB.

In my case this was really a one-time thing so, after I had created the copy of the document library, I set the size back to the original 10485760 byte value.

Technorati Tags: command-line, SharePoint, stsadm

Out of the box, MOSS is set to run the profile sync timer job once every hour.  So I ran the following command to show me which content DBs haven’t been synced in the last day:

stsadm.exe -o sync -listolddatabases 1

On my vpc, it looks like this:

This looks helpful except for the fact that nobody knows what the GUID of their content DBs are.  On the client farm there some DBs with very old dates and I could tell something was wrong.  I needed to figure out what the names of the DBs with the old GUIDs are.  The easiest way to do that is to browse to Central Administration and mouse-over your content DBs.  Then you can eyeball the DB GUIDs in the status bar of your browser as it shows you the URL of the hyperlink.  It looks like this:

The GUID of the content DB you are pointing to starts after the “DatabaseID=%7B” in your status bar. Also take note that the “%2D” in the status bar refers to the hyphen character.  Now you know the GUID of that SharePoint Content Database.

I tried going back to the command-line to use stsadm to force it to sync.  To do that I just typed in:

stsadm.exe –o sync

I waited a while and even checked the timer job status in Central Admin and waited for it to say the Profile Sync job had completed successfully.  It turns out that this sync command only forces the “quick” version which does not go through the same job that that is scheduled for every hour.  I was disappointed to see that my content database did not get updated so now I used stsadm to wipe out my profile sync info for the databases with old data.  The following command will delete the profile sync data for databases that haven’t been synced in the last day:

stsadm.exe –o sync –deleteolddatabases

I was feeling good about myself at this point but after double-checking my work I learned that it STILL had not synced.  There was no getting around it, I had to look at the ULS logs.  When I poked around I found a line that kept showing up that alarmed me.  Referring to “SharePoint Portal Server User Profiles” the description portion of the error said something like “Aborting sweepsynch for guid instance {SomeGUID} due to null or non-online content database”.

This sounded familiar to me because I knew we had left some content databases in “offline” mode to prevent them from getting new site collections created in them (they’re already too big).  So when I looked back in Central Administration to see which databases were offline, it turned out to be every one of the ones that weren’t syncing the profiles.

This isn’t documented anywhere but it looks like content databases that are marked as “offline” in central administration will not get synced with profile sync jobs.  Once I turned them all back to “ready”, I had a very looooong running profile sync job after that and it was all clear from there on out.

Technorati Tags: command-line, MOSS, SharePoint, stsadm, WSS

I thought I had seen this info on Updates Resource Center page but either I was wrong or it’s gone now. I

It took me a while but I found it on technet. It’s on the “Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007” TechNet page in the “Available Updates” section.

Not only is it there, but it appears to be updated.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint