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9/16/2009

Where are my sites in IIS on my other SharePoint server(s)?!?!?

Yeah…not a good question ask yourself. But I found myself in this situation today. It appeared that I had run the updatefarmcredentials on one of the SP servers, but not the other…oops. :) What I saw was a second SharePoint server that had no IIS apps on it for the new web apps I created for the SSP. Therefore the SSP creation was failing too. I look on my other server, and lo and behold, there are no other sites on it beside default and office web services. The timer jobs indicated that they had failed in Central Admin –> Operations –> Timer Job status. So I deleted them. Now for the resolution!

I went to my second server and ran the updatefarmcredentials there. So we had goodness in the world, but still no joy on the sites. I thought to myself, “self what have you done?!?!” So I thought about it, and then I thought, “what if I try this…” Usually disastrous, true, but it worked for me. What I did was go to services on server (Central Admin –> Operations) and dropped the box down on the offending server. At the bottom you see this:

So I just clicked “Stop” on the SharePoint Services Web Application. After stopping, I restarted and voila! the web apps appeared on the server! Happy day!

I hope this may be helpful to someone out there!

Posted at 3:03 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

8/21/2009

KYSPUG – HA and DR

Thanks so much to everyone that came out and sat through the presentation last night. It was a TON of information to digest, and I want to make sure that if we need to continue the discussion, please do so here. Leave a comment and I will get back to you ASAP. Remember there was a bunch of supplemental material on the slide show, so be sure to download from my SkyDrive. There is a link to it on the homepage of the blog.

Thanks so much for participating and helping to turn KYSPUG into what it is today!

Posted at 11:11 AM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

7/30/2009

Loopback Check Issues with 2008

This spring, I had the privilege of attending TechEd. It was a great experience, and I learned a lot while out in LA. One of the sessions that I remember well was held by Todd Klindt and Shane Young. During one section of the talk, they discussed the loopback problem that more than likely has bit any SP admin once or twice. They discussed that in the MSFT KB article there were two solutions to the issue; one was to disable it all together and thus shutting off a security feature built in, or to create a registry key to allow for certain sites to circumvent the check. They talked about why you should or shouldn’t do one or the other, but I have slept since then and forgotten.

The point of this post was that I found a blog post by Spencer Harbar that lays out the pros and cons of each and why there are two option to fix the issue in the first place. Very much akin to what Shane and Todd, in their impeccable style, said at TechEd this past May.

See it here: http://harbar.net/archive/2009/07/02/disableloopbackcheck-amp-sharepoint-what-every-admin-and-developer-should-know.aspx

Posted at 12:32 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

7/27/2009

STSADM and Search for WSS 3.0

There is no nice search admin page for WSS Search, AKA spsearch, in the CA site. MSFT has a good article that will tell you how to kick off full crawls for WSS. A good reason to run a full crawl would be having put in a PDF iFilter and you just can’t wait to get results. I needed this for a client and thought I would share it with you.

Look here for the rock n’ roll: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288507.aspx

Posted at 5:02 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/20/2009

The OneNote goodness

I am a consultant; and OneNote is my friend. I do my documentation in it. I take notes in it. I record stuff in it. I put tasks in Outlook with it. It’s just killer. So when I saw @iheartonenote post a video link to twitter, I thought I would share it with my readers.

The video’s name is goofy, but what’s in a name?

Posted at 2:31 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

KYSPUG for May 2009

So it’s that time again, time for KY SharePoint users group. It will be tomorrow night at 5:30 at the usual spot; the Mirazon Group offices. I will be presenting tomorrow and will be discussing the basics of administration in SharePoint. I call it, “SharePoint admin 101”; clever, huh?

As always, our friends at KForce are sponsoring the event and will have plenty of great food for you all. I hope to see you there, and bring your questions! Remember this is a community-driven group; the leaders want the community to interact with us; we can all learn from one another.

http://kyspug.org

Posted at 2:25 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/19/2009

TechEd 09

Wow, what an experience! Last week was my first trip to TechEd, and it was fantastic. I met a lot of great people and learned a ton of new stuff. If you haven’t been and you have to opportunity to go, do it! You will learn so much and get to know some great people.

I got to meet Todd Klindt and see the dynamic duo that is him and Shane Young speak at a few sessions. They did a great job and gave some great information. I sat through Matt McDermott’s excellent session configuring search for extended properties and it was an eye opener. It wasn’t that I didn’t know search was extensible; it was just another thing to see it in action.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a ton about SharePoint 2010. I would have to go to the SP Conference to get that info, which I will not be doing, unfortunately. As such is life at times.

I am hoping that I may blog a bit more here soon, so stay tuned…

Posted at 4:17 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/4/2009

Wow...and apologies.

It has been a long while since I have posted on here. Sorry about that. My whole purpose in setting up a blog was to be able help others by sharing my SharePoint experiences with them. Unfortunately, I have not been posting as I should have been.

So this is not a call to renewal per se. Life happens and sometimes its hard to fit a blog post in. I am a consultant by trade, and those of you who are as well will know that it can be difficult to find time to blog...especially when you are on a client's time. They don't like to pay for that. I hope that I will be able to post more; surely there will be more to blog about...if only I could talk into a mic and have it all transcriber for me ;)

Posted at 8:40 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/17/2008

A very KYSPUG Christmas!

If you are in the Louisville area, be sure to stop by our first annual KYSPUG Christmas Party and one year anniversary! Thanks to all who have supported us this year. Thank you for helping Jeremy and I create such an awesome SharePoint community here in the best city in Kentucky. We will be meeting at KT’s on Lexington Rd. We will provide the appetizers, you cover anything else you want. Same time: 5:30-7:30.

We are very excited about the next coming year as well! We have some great speakers lined up for the new year; people you don’t want to miss such as Shane Young (MVP), Robert Bogue and others TBA.

Thanks so much for letting us serve you and spread the joy of this awesome platform. We’d also like to thank our sponers, The Mirazon Group and KForce Professional Staffing. A special thanks also needs to be extended to Culminis and ISPA for helping us to spread the word and spreading the wealth.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted at 9:19 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

11/21/2008

Kerberos and SharePoint – undocumented step with host headers

I have been fighting with Kerberos at a client lately. The issue I was running into was with an extended site. The default zone had a name of http://NetBIOs name. The extended site, in the internet zone, had a AAM of http://name.domain.com. The default zone had Kerberos and had no issues on any of the clients. The extended site did.

When you would try to login into the site, a login prompt would popup. Obviously, with Kerberos, you should not be prompted. If it prompts, authentication has failed back to NTLM. The other oddity in this was the fact that the login box had the FQDN of the server in the box rather than the host header. If authentication was flipped back to NTLM in the authentication providers section of CA, then the proper name appeared in the login dialog box. I worked on this for nearly 20 hours. I gave in and called Microsoft.

After three hours on the phone with the SP support fellow, he said that he thought it was an IIS issue, as my config looked good. So he set me up with a case number with the IIS/ASP.NET team. Four hours later, the gentleman from the IIS team called me.

And then he says, “Let’s try something. Add the host header to the Intranet Zone in IE Internet Settings.” I had tried putting it into the trusted sites earlier, but that didn’t help so I placed the host header in the Intranet Zone and it worked. All that frustration over THAT. SERIOUSLY. The SharePoint tech missed that step too. He advised trying trusted sites

Wow.

The tech explained that normal behavior for IE was what causing the issue. IE 7 is deployed in the environment, so I didn’t think about that issue that users saw with XP/IE 6. He explained that when using Kerberos for authentication, and it sees a URL formed with http://name.domain.com, it will query DNS rather than “trusting” the name in the IE address bar. The . after name triggers the query. This host header has a CNAME in DNS point to the .com domain. The client has a .local AD domain name. Pushing out a GPO that will add the host header to all the client Intranet zones in the company.

If you ware looking to put Kerberos in with Sharepoint, I highly recommend it. There are quite a few great articles. Here are my favorites.

On IIS7 this requires adding a line to the ApplicationHost.config file. This step is not required on Server 2003/IIS6.

Posted at 5:06 PM by Greg Kamer | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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