Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the SharePoint Technology Conference in Boston. Too cool. Got to meet several new people from the Twitterverse (I am @ShanesCows in case you were wondering). I would list the people but I never know if that is appropriate or not. Anyway.

I promised a download PDF of all of the sessions I did so here they are.

Todd Klindt and I did a whole day workshop on being a SharePoint administrator. For that session I have two decks. The SharePoint Admin deck is old faithful. It is all of the core Admin stuff we have delivered around the world brought back to glory once again. Good stuff. The other deck is stolen straight from my SharePoint Administrator's Class and it all of the dev things we admins need to know, like Features, Solution Packages, and Code Access Security (EEK!). You can get that deck here. Dealing with developers is fun. ;)

The following day I had to do my search session all by myself. Very sad. You can grab that deck here.

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

Wow the weeks are getting away from me. Thought I would quickly list out some of my upcoming usergroups, webcasts, trainings, and conferences. Just so you know what to avoid. ;)

Available now from your desk:

Todd and I while at TechEd recorded a quick TechTalk – SharePoint: What could possibly go wrong? "SharePoint environments are like snowflakes. Each one is intricate and it seems no two are alike. In this TechTalk, Shane and Todd talk about some of the things done wrong in SharePoint installations they've seen. They also talk about how to fix those things." Available for a free viewing at http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=8d46ef7a-7455-4854-a66d-0fd692766b58

May 21, 2009 Columbus, Ohio:

I will be presenting at the Columbus Usergroup monthly meeting at 5:30 pm. This will be my second trip to hang out with this group so it should be fun. Someone has graciously offered to let me odd their server farm in front of everyone. Yikes! So I will be looking for mistakes in the install and config and giving guidance on common mistakes along the way. http://www.sharepointgroups.org/cospug/default.aspx

May 22, 2009 Columbus, Ohio:

I get to do my first keynote! The COSPUG is having a one day FREE SharePoint Show-n-tell event! http://www.sharepointgroups.org/cospug/Pages/Show-N-Tell.aspx I know this is late notice but if you can register now before spots fill up. This will be an awesome day of practical experience.

June 1, 2009 your desk:

I will be doing a virtual usergroup presentation for SharePoint Nation. http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=83970739778 Will be those core admin topics making sure that deployment was done right.

June 1, 2009 – June 5, 2009 your desk:

My world famous admin webcast is running this week. With everyone having their training budgets (especially travel) being cut so hard the online class has become quite popular. Need hardcore admin training you have come to the right place. http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/Schedule/Pages/090601-WC-SPA401-Webcast.aspx

June 15, 2009 – June 19, 2009 Dallas, Texas:

Todd Klindt and I are doing the SharePoint Survival Camp in beautiful Dallas Texas. http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/Schedule/Pages/20090615-SSC401-Dallas.aspx You can't have more fun (or learn more) about SharePoint administration in five days anywhere else.

June 22, 2009 – June 24, 2009 Boston, Massachusetts:

SPTechcon rules! Enough said. http://www.sptechcon.com Lots of top notch speakers talking about lots of fun things. Todd and I will be there doing a one day workshop and then some other scattered sessions. This will be a party. Use ShanesCows as your registration code to save some $$$.

I have a few other things in the hopper but that is enough for now.

Shane SharePoint Consulting

Service Pack 2 was released today (as I am guessing the whole world knows by now). Instead of making that profound announcement I would recommend you check out this post on the SharePoint Team blog for the official announcement. I will spare you the crazy details other than you should install it. J

Just like when the last updates came out I figured I would write a quick guide on the steps I am taking to install. Something to ponder before you get started. When was the last time you did a backup? Knock on wood as you answer.

1. Start time 11:11 PM
2. I am checking Windows Update for the latest patches. Looks like SQL Server 2008 SP1, IE8, and a random other Office update is waiting to install. I think I will let them sit for another evening; I have to get up early in the morning.
3. This environment is a single box with both MOSS Enterprise and SQL Server 2008. MOSS is currently running the February cumulative updates build 12.0.0.6341.
4. Downloading WSS SP2. 32.9 MB in 29 seconds. Make sure you download the 32bit or 64bit version you need. Both are available from the linked page.
5. Downloading MOSS SP2. 270 MB in 3 minutes 54 seconds. Make sure you download the 32bit or 64bit version you need. Both are available from the linked page.
6. Launched the WSS SP2 EXE I just downloaded.
7. Agreed to the license terms and clicked Continue
8. Started 11:22 PM. Ended 11:24 PM.
9. When configuration wizard opens click Cancel and Yes at the warning. We will run config wizard after the MOSS update is installed also.
10. Launched the MOSS SP2 EXE I just downloaded
11. Agreed to the license terms and clicked Continue
12. Started 11:25 PM. Ended 11:36 PM.
13. Configuration Wizard opens automatically when the update finished installing.
14. Click Next at the welcome screen
15. Click Yes to stopping IIS, SharePoint Admin Service, and SharePoint Timer Service
16. Click Next at the completing screen
17. You will get a popup warning that you need to install the updates on all servers in your farm before continuing. Be sure to do that if you have multiple servers.
18. Click OK.
19. Start at 11:38 PM. About 3 GB of content in this farm. End at 11:48 PM.
20. Click Finish
21. Looks like I am left with build 12.0.0.6421

Remember these are the steps I took on my server. They are put here to give you basic guidance, if you feel you want to read about applying updates in excruationing details then check out these links from the Team blog.

Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288269.aspx
Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263467.aspx

OK so a question for you. Do you like these update install guides with so many details or would you prefer I leave out everything and just make it quick. You really don't care about my Windows updates or how long it takes to install?

Shane SharePoint Consulting

Had a client today (last week now) who broke search all the way. And in their attempts to straighten it out they changed some pieces that weren't broken. Then while they were in the process of trying to put it all back together I called and said let me at it so they just stopped. Needless to say I picked up the farm in an odd state or more exactly Search was dead.

So the first step always when Search is broke is to go to the SSP Admin and check out things.

1. Open the SSP Administration page
2. Click on Search Administration and see what it has to say. (if you don't see Search Administration this means you have not installed the infrastructure update. I would highly recommend at a minimum you have that installed. Get the latest update install guide here)

When I opened the page I saw a Crawl status of Error. That is about worthless.

That is pretty much as generic as they come. You get the same Error when the server is on fire as you do when there is small hiccup. So a much better thing to do is:

1. Go back to the SSP administration page
2. Click on Search Settings (which is what we used pre infrastructure update)

This page does a much better job of giving you tangible errors. Here is what I got:

Error: An indexer is not assigned to the Shared Services Provider 'SharedServices1'.

Link to: Configure an indexer and a search database for this Shared Services Provider

Well that is fixable but how did they end up like this? They stopped the Indexing service in the farm by:

1. Go to Central Admin
2. Click on Operations
3. Click Services on Server
4. They choose their Index server
5. Then clicked Stop to the right of Office SharePoint Search Service

This doesn't just stop the service. This actually removes the service completely. This also removes the Index server from any SSP configured to use it. Now if you did want to just start and stop the service there is a way to do this:

1. Open a command prompt
2. Type net stop osearch and press enter
3. Type net start osearch and press enter

This will cycle the search service. Usually the only time you need to do something like this is after installing a new ifilter but sometimes it makes you feel better to give it a shot and see if that helps your problem. I do it more often than I should just for that reason.

Back to the task at hand clearing up that error! I double checked and they had already reconfigured the Office SharePoint Search Service on the Index server so all I need to do is go back to the Index server and re-associate the indexer.

1. From Central Administration click on Shared Services Administration from the left hand side of the page.
2. Hover over the SSP name, click the drop down arrow and click Edit properties

1. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select your Index server from the Index Server dropdown. If you see No Indexers in red you need to go back to your Services on Server and make sure you have the Office SharePoint Search service started and configured for the Index role.
2. Confirm that you have the correct index location. Usually the C: drive is less than ideal.
3. Click Ok

The SSP is now configured with an Indexer. Let's go make sure Search is happy.

1. Now click on the Shared Services Provider name to open the SSP admin site.
2. Click Search Settings

Don't be surprised if you get this error:

Error: The search service is currently offline. Visit the Services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress.

Typically this is because the wheels of Search can move slowly. I have seen this error come up for 10 minutes or so in some farms. What Search is really telling you is it is busy getting the index and the database ready to go so you can start indexing. Be patient grass hopper. At the client this was gone after about 2 minutes.

Once I was able to get to a happy Search Settings page I went ahead and reset the Index back to zero. Not always necessary but they had 33,000 items in the index and 140,000 or errors. I thought better to start everything back to 0.

In order to reset the Index.

1. From the SSP admin screen click Search Administration
2. From the left hand column (quick launch for those who know terminology) click Reset all crawled content
3. Select Deactivate search alerts during reset
4. Click Reset now

Now you have a completely blank index. Why did we choose to deactivate search alerts? This is to keep from annoying the users. We don't want them all to get new alerts when new content is discovered when we recrawl in a minute. Once the index is back to normal we will re enable the alerts for them.

Ok so now the next step should be doing a full crawl. So let's try that.

1. From your SSP Administration home page click Search Administration
2. From the Quick Launch bar (on the left) click Content Sources
3. Hover over your Content Source, click the drop down arrow, and select full crawl
4. Now go back to the home page of Search Administration and watch to see if the crawl is running

Unfortunately in our case after about a minute I was left with 0 items in the index and 3 errors. After checking the errors I got Access Denied. L If you haven't done any monkeying around with changing your default content access account then it should have been automatically granted full access to your content source. You can confirm this by checking your Policy for web application in Central administration. If you forget how to do that check this blog post for a reminder. http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/01/21/become-administrator-of-the-entire-web-application.aspx

If that checked out ok then the next thing I would check is to make sure your web application is set to integrated authentication and not basic authentication. MOSS will not pass basic authentication by default. So if you changed your web application from integrated to basic, so people users don't have to enter their domain for example, then you need to setup a custom crawl rule to pass basic authentication.

1. From your SSP Administration home page click Search Administration
2. In the Quick Launch bar click Crawl rules
3. Click New Crawl Rule
4. For path enter your web app URL ex: http://portal.company.com/*
5. For Crawl Configuration select Include all items in this path
6. For Specify Authentication select Specify a different content access account
7. Now fill in username and password remembering your domain\username form. I would recommended using your normal search account as you know it already has read access to the content.
8. Key step de-select the box to Do not allow Basic Authentication
9. Now do a full crawl. Also, remember if you have multiple web apps you may need more than one of this rules.

For the client this was not this issue but it is an important and often over looked troubleshooting step so I thought throwing it in here would be helpful.

The next thing I take a look at is the dreaded loopback fix. I showed this one to Todd Klindt one time and he wrote a nice post on the issue and a like to the KB for fixing it. http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=107 It is all but a guarantee these days if you have the WFE and Index role on the same server you are going to need to do this. A lot of farms have ran fine for a long time and just recently they have started requiring it. Must have been a Windows update that is causing this to be needed more but I haven't identified it. Another note even though this fix is only listed as applying to Windows 2003 it also applies to Windows 2008, had a different client need it last week. J

Loopback fix in and the server rebooted I tried another Full crawl. Success! Seems this was the root of their issues but as is often the case that happens to all of us, trying to fix it only made the problem worse. LOL

Don't forget to re-enable those search alerts.

1. From your SSP administration home page click Search Administration
2. In the System Status section in the center of the page click Search alerts status Enable

Another troubleshooting step I skipped, because the client had already done it was resetting search permissions. Read the blog post John Ross did summing up the steps to get permissions back on the up and up for the Search Service. http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/john/archive/2009/04/03/change-to-group-policy-broke-sharepoint-search-–-thanks-conficker-scare.aspx

Something I learned that was new

I am guessing since I didn't realize this is an option (or more probably I knew and forgot) you probably didn't either. So run stsadm –o help like below and take a look at the output.

Use Stsadm.exe from the 12 hive (c:\program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\). Actually 12\bin to be exact.

C:\ >stsadm -help osearch

stsadm -o osearch

[-action <list|start|stop|showdefaultsspadmin>] required parameters for 'start' (if not already set): role, farmcontactemail, service credentials

[-f (suppress prompts)]

[-role <Index|Query|IndexQuery>]

[-farmcontactemail <email>]

[-farmperformancelevel <Reduced|PartlyReduced|Maximum>]

[-farmserviceaccount <DOMAIN\name> (service credentials)]

[-farmservicepassword <password>]

[-defaultindexlocation <directory>]

[-propagationlocation <directory>]

[-cleansearchdatabase <true|false>]

[-ssp <ssp name>] required parameter for 'cleansearchdatabase'

So really very similar to the options you have available to you from the GUI. The reason I used it was one of the Query servers was stuck in the starting state. In the GUI there is no stop until the service gets too started, not even a reboot will help. With stsadm you can do a stop and get out of the perpetual starting. J A very helpful trick.

If you are still fighting with Search here are couple of other Search troubleshooting things I wrote a while back

• More Problems with SQL Server High CPU and MOSS Search
• Another day, another new error message

Hope you enjoy what feels like a small book

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Whoops... because i am a big dummy I screwed up this post. Sorry, hope you weren't using it. :)  Install SharePoint SP2 now instead. 

Sorry

Shane SharePoint Consulting

We have arrived. Todd Klindt and I were interviewed for the SharePoint pod cast show last week. Too funny! Lots of laughs and some actual valuable SharePoint admin content. Come for the cow jokes and stay for the learning. ;)

Check it out http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/archive/2009/03/09/administering-a-sharepoint-farm-episode-18.aspx

Shane SharePoint Consulting

So as I sit here today I have four main web 2.0 or social media outlets:

Twitter - http://twitter.com/shanescows

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/people/Shane-Young/536832933

SharePoint Blog – http://msmvps.com/shane

Personal Blog – http://www.shanescows.com

The purpose of this post is to clearly spell out my intended use of each one. This way you can make an educated decision on which you may want to subscribe or follow me and my antics around the web.

Twitter (Professional)

I use Twitter for SharePoint stuff. This includes posting links to my blogs, announcing new web casts and white papers, links to SharePoint content, general SharePoint news for the community, and networking with SharePoint people. You will occasionally see non-SharePoint techy stuff on my twitter but it is done under the spirit of SharePoint community. For example when I was at SharePointTechCon several of us went on a field trip to downtown San Francisco. During the trip I had tweets talking about riding in the trunk and stuff. Since I was with SharePoint people at a SharePoint conference I felt this appropriate for Twitter. You will not see tweets about my dogs or how much airports suck.

I do also subscribe to the Twitter search for the term SharePoint. So I will see people with SharePoint question tweets and will try to respond to them with suggestions as appropriate. Also, on Twitter I follow some people who are non SharePoint. Typically I am doing this only to consume their information, if I start wanting to "tweet" with them about non SharePoint stuff on a regular basis I will start a new Twitter account at that time.

You are welcome to follow me at http://twitter.com/shanescows. I do not follow everyone who follows me but I do generally check a new followers profile and see what they have recently tweeted, if I am interested I follow them. Don't take it as an insult if I don't follow you, I may have been super busy when you started following me or you may have just had a run of tweets I didn't care for. It is a free country Tweet as you would like.

Unfollowing: I will typically unfollow people for things like posting they lyrics of songs to be annoying or for just generally posting dumb crap more often than good stuff. If I unfollow you, sorry, but your and my ideas of what Twitter is for have changed. No big deal.

Facebook (Personal)

This is where I post things like "We got tickets to the Cyclones game in a suite tonight" or "The weather in Tampa is awesome". This is for my friends old and new to keep up with my personal tidbits. I also enjoy reading friends updates of the tidbits of what they are doing.

As a rule I don't play the Facebook games. No snowball fights or birthday apps for me. Not to say you don't enjoy them but I don't use Facebook for that. Also, 95% of the time I use Facebook (FB) mobile to get information so none of the other crazy FB stuff works there.

Feel free to add me as a friend on Facebook if you want to keep up with those types of adventures and want to share with me the little things you are doing. I will take all the friends I can get. http://www.facebook.com/people/Shane-Young/536832933

The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac – SharePoint Blog (Professional)

Are you looking for how to upgrade from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Microsoft Office Server 2007 or want to know what is an SSP? This is the place for you. I only post pertinent, professional SharePoint information on this blog, typically covering the administrator's point of view. Sometimes I have lots of post (like when the next version of SharePoint is in Beta) other times they are few and far between. Either way this is a great resource if you are a SharePoint administrator who doesn't want any noise, just good information. I promise if it made it to this blog you need to know about it.

You will see no personal post on this blog. Though I have been known to give away free stuff and discount codes to training classes.

Comments – I generally approve all valid (not spam) comments to my blog within a few days but I do stink at responding to comments. Sorry. If you have a SharePoint question you need answered you should look to different community resources such as the Microsoft SharePoint forums or the SharePoint helpdesk my company offers. http://msmvps.com/shane and then there is an RSS feed you can subscribe to.

ShanesCows – Personal Blog (Personal)

This is where I will say things people will probably hold against me. :) I am about to become a Dad for the first time so should be lots of fun things to post. Also, I travel A LOT. So I always have things to post about airports, airlines, hotels, rental cars, and strange cities. I really am looking forward to this new blog as an outlet. Might be interesting, might be lame, guess we will all find out together. Hopefully the kid will be able to look back at it one day and see the embarrassing things I said about him as a baby. I will print out stories and hand them to his dates when he gets older.

http://www.shanescows.com will be the location of the blog, interestingly enough it is actually going to be hosted on SharePoint.

Other places I am on the web

LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/89/110

I manly use this to accept connections and occasional contacts. I am not very active.

SharePoint Forums

I don't participate here as much as I should but occasionally I pop in to answer questions.

Summary

So I realize this is a lot to consume and I don't expect you to agree with how I am using everything. That is cool; you very well may do things differently. I just wanted to clearly state the way I am using these different outlets so you can know what to expect of me. I meet a lot of great people from conferences, classes I teach, and from virtual communities so I wanted to make it easier to connect and follow up with all of you in this virtual world.

I look forward to seeing you on the web!

Shane Young

My lovely wife Nicola Young and my rock star employee John Ross just published a new book called MOSS Explained: An information workers deep dive into MOSS 2007. How cool!

This book is the logical progression of the information worker. Lots of books target what is a list and basic stuff but this is the first book (that I know of) to really say "OK, now here is how you rock out the cool features." Even better it is written not by to uber geeks (like the books we normal write) but instead by two people who work with IWs everyday. Hell, Nicola was a psychology major and only my evilness forced her into the land of IT.

Check out the book!

Shane – SharePoint Help

Sorry for the late notice. What I am going to attempt to pull off is a live customer audit of their SharePoint farm. Should be a lot of fun.

Its Flu Season – How is your SharePoint Server Feeling?
Instructor: Shane Young
Date: February 16, 2009
Time: 2 – 3 p.m. EST
Price: Free!
Over the past couple of years one of the most common requests Shane has received at SharePoint911 is server install/configuration validation. And through these reviews he has found some very common mistakes and some very bizarre things. So, for the first time EVER, Shane is going to show the world what he does when he conducts a server review. In this one hour seminar, Shane will point out the little nooks and crannies to check for problems and things that are just good ideas. This one should be quite interesting to see the progression and you may even pickup a tip or two along the way.
Register today!

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

What are you doing May 10^th in Los Angeles? The only right answer is spending the day with Todd and I discussing SharePoint Governance. Duh! ;)

Check out PreCon 15 http://www.msteched.com/teched/seminars.aspx

Last year Todd and I sold out our precon event on SharePoint Upgrades and Administration

and it was such a fun filled comedy fest we were invited back this year. Sadly it will be the same jokes but all new educational material. Also, last year we gave away a Zune and an XBOX 360. No promises for this year's giveaways but… I typically like to offer up all of Todd's paycheck for giveaways cause I am nice that way.

Why Governance? Who needs Governance of SharePoint anyway? The short answer? EVERYONE! Governance is crucial to keeping that awesome SharePoint environment you setup awesome. A brief description follows:

This session takes you through the process of developing a successful implementation plan for your Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) deployment. Determining the goals and vision, stakeholders, level of customization or development, rollout, phasing, intranet, extranet, and Internet considerations and taxonomy of your portal are all discussed through lectures, hands-on experience, and case studies. This class not only covers what you should do, but also real world scenarios and best practices.

More information on TechEd registration which is currently $200 off. http://www.msteched.com/teched/registration-info.aspx

Hope to see you in LA!

Shane SharePoint Consulting

So Todd and I are here at www.SPTechCon.com speaking and the class wants this deck so I am uploading it. http://sharepoint911.com/Downloads/Hurry Up.pdf

Hi class – Here is a sweet set of cow jokes you all can tell Todd to impress him. http://sharepoint911.com/Downloads/Jokes about MooCows.pdf

Thanks

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

If you are going to be at http://www.sptechcon.com then you should plan on some SharePoint socializing in the grandest of traditions, by attending SharePint. This age old tradition was started by Andrew Connell and is now starting to occur everywhere there is are SharePoint people to be found. For details on this event check out - http://jhaebets.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/sptechcon-sharepint/

Or if you want to see how SharePint got started go checkout http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2007/10/15/SharePoint-by-Day-SharePint-by-Night--SharePoint-Connections-in.aspx

The cute image is courtesy of Andrew Woodward http://www.21apps.com/sharepint/logos/

Shane SharePoint Consulting

On the SharePoint IT Pro documentation team blog there is a wonderful new paper out with some fancy name; we will call it the SharePoint Admin Guide. The paper was written by the team at SharePoint911 with guidance from Brenda C. at Microsoft.

The idea of the paper is it quickly touches on all of the considerations and gotchas a new administrator needs to watch out for. Things like common installation mistakes to what consideration for branding and development you need make. The idea is not for the paper to tell you in great detail everything you need to know. Instead, the paper makes sure you don't encounter the "I didn't even know about that" issue when you server farm. Of course if you want deep details then we reference all of that material also.

Anyway, go download it and read, I promise you will like it.

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Randy Drisgill aka The MOSSMan was awarded his MVP on Jan 1. You can find his blog here http://blog.drisgill.com/. I know several other MVPs were awarded or renewed but Randy is special because he works for me at SharePoint911, so in lieu of a raise he gets pimped on my blog.

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Had this one pop up for a second time today so thought I would blog it this time.

Client created a public website for baseball signups. It was a simply publishing portal with anonymous enabled. He then created an InfoPath form and set it up to generate an email with the info from the form. He published this form to a form library using Forms Services and then embedded the form using a page viewer web part on a new ASPX page so people could just navigate and fill out the page.

The problem – the site would pop up an authentication box every time an anonymous person would visit the site. Even stranger if someone would get the authentication box and then enter proper credentials for the remainder of the day anonymous access worked fine. Then each morning back to the same problem. ODD.

Turns out the issue was the lockdown feature used with the publishing portal. Not everyone realizes it but when you create a site collection using the publishing portal there is a hidden feature that fires called ViewFormPagesLockdown. This feature, among other things, sets it so /_layouts directory is not available to the anonymous user. For more details see the ECM Team blog post. So we simply deactivated the feature and reset the anonymous permissions and life was good again.

One thing to pay particular attention to with this feature every time you toggle this feature on or off you need to disable and enable anonymous access for the new settings to take effect. That part can drive you bonkers.

Shane – SharePoint help

New Year = New work for you. As I look into my crystal ball for 2009 I see Windows Server 2008 and 64 bit servers in your future. Why? If for no other reason than the next version of SharePoint will be 64bit only and I know you are looking forward to test driving it whenever it shows up. Todd and I have spent quite a bit of time discussing the items below so I thought I would share some of the thoughts we had.

64 bit

You are probably a lot like me and think 32 bit vs. 64 bit? No big deal, everything is the same you just get to use more memory. Yeah… on the surface that sounds great but in reality not the case. In reality, the software world is still very new to this whole 64bit thing and sometimes we are the ones who suffer. An example is simple things like ifilters for Search. For the longest time we didn't have a reliable, free 64 bit PDF ifilter. This caused more than one SharePoint deployment to be changed in mid project because no one checked; they just assumed it was available. The point is until you do a project top to bottom in 64 bit you are going to be under the false assumption it will all just work. Did you know the VSeWSS (Visual Studio Extension for SharePoint) only work in 32 bit?

Now luckily for us the current version of SharePoint runs in both 32 and 64 bit so this is the time to play. In a perfect world you would have two test farms, one for 32 bit and one for 64 bit, and then you could try everything twice. You probably also know that you can mix and match the two architectures in the same farm, while this is true try to proceed with caution. While they can be combined you cannot mix a role. So for example if your web front end (WFE) is 32 bit then you shouldn't add a second WFE that is 64 bit, this is unsupported. But you can have a 32 bit WFE and 64 bit Index server with no problems.

Even outside of the SharePoint/Administrator space 64 bit is becoming more prevalent. My new Dell M4400 is running Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit. Why? The laptop supports 8 GB of RAM and to take advantage of that you need 64 bit. The downside to this is for a lot of hardware the 64 bit drivers are not as readily available or they are not as stable as their 32 bit counterparts. Then once you do a get a stable deployment of Windows on your laptop you may find not all of your software works. For a long time Cisco didn't have a 64 bit VPN client, that was very painful. Eugene Rosenfeld has a blog post on Why I hate x64 which points out some oddities when it comes to software, some have been fixed others have not. The key thing here is you would have never thought of these things not working until you committed to running 64 bit.

I realize after reading this it is easy to think this 64 bit thing sucks, I should just avoid it. No. You need to take this knowledge and embrace it because sooner than later you will find yourself running 64 bit servers. Would you prefer to learn them now while it is a side thought instead of being knee deep into a critical project, trying to meet a deadline and discover such things?

Other Random Reading – Making the Move to x64

(This is funny but I am having this same conversation on Twitter right now completely unrelated to this post.)

Windows Server 2008

Another false assumption – I know EVERYTHING there is to know about Windows Server 2003 so I am already an expert at W2k8. Wrong again. You may be able to figure out things fairly quickly but there are a lot of little things that are different. For a SharePoint admin IIS 7 != IIS 6 no matter how badly we want it to be. Example? I tried to setup SharePoint and Kerberos on a Windows 2008 box and a few hours later I found the new check box I needed to deselect in a post from Spence. :( Did you know that W2k8 has a 28 MB file upload limit baked in? I didn't until the first time I encountered it. Windows Server 2008 WFE will not allow large file uploads The list goes on and on.

Now this stuff does not mean W2k8 is bad, just different. And until you dig your claws in and play A LOT you aren't going to learn these little differences. I have been trying to blog the differences as I have encountered them but there are more to come.

Another random thought about W2k8 is our dear friend Hyper-V. If you see the use of Hyper-V in your future you need to start with it early and often also. It is not the next version of Virtual PC or Virtual Server so experience with those products will not help. Hyper-V is faster but at a cost of having to learn again how to build and configure things. Even more annoying, most of your W2k3 VHDs will have to be reactivated when you move them to Hyper-V. Very rude. Once again, you aren't going to find the nuisances until you try.

My challenge to you

Find yourself a box you can install Windows Server 2008 64 bit on with Hyper-V. Then in Hyper-V create a virtual Windows Server 2008 64 bit box. Now add SQL 2008 and then MOSS 2007 SP1 + the December cumulative update. How did that go? I am sure it wasn't easy but I promise you will have learned plenty along the way and at the end you will have a nice play ground for testing against. Hell, then be sure to update your resume with all of the new skills you just acquired. :)

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

True story.

This was my surprise gift from my team at SharePoint911. All I can say is they rock! The picture doesn't do it great justice but this thing is super cool. Now I need to think of some strange things to do with it. Anyway, don't have too much fun.

Happy Holidays!

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

http://www.sptechcon.com/

Should be a fun conference. Why? It starts out with a 1 day admin bonanza with Todd Klindt and yours truly. And just in case that isn't complete worth the price of admission they have like 3 more days of content, sprinkled with random sessions from us. LOL

No seriously. Should be a really cool conference Jan 27 – 29 with some big name speakers including the infamous Tom Rizzo. Complete list here. The first day will feature full day and half day sessions while the remaining two will be the traditional 75 minutes sessions. I am really looking forward to the event, especially since there will be snow in Cincinnati in January but not in San Francisco. J I also heard yesterday the conference is going to sell out soon so you may need to poke your boss with a big stick to get this approved in time.

Most of the SharePoint911 crew will be at the conference so look for a little private get together at some point during the week. Stop by our both to get the scoop. J

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

I had a client a couple weeks ago who upgraded from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 using the database attach method. This means the MOSS farm was built on new hardware which we chose Windows Server 2008 for. This was a very challenging upgrade for several reasons but primarly because the 2003 site database was in bad shape. Once we worked through the issues and got things up we noticed strange behavior. When uploading a large file (anything larger than 28 MB) the browser would instantly come back with a 404 error. So our first thought was check the three normal settings for large uploads.

• Central Admin > Application Management > General web application settings. By default this is 50 MB. You can increase to 2 GB.
• Then you can go into IIS. Find your web application and go to properties. Then change the IIS timeout from 120 seconds to a much larger setting.
• Upload.aspx is an application page. Application pages have their own web.config which controls their timeout. The default for these pages is 360 seconds. You need to increase this.

All of these settings apply whether you are using w2k3 or w2k8 and are covered in this kb http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925083

We made all of those changes and no change in behavior. And besides we didn't have a timeout issue because on a 27 MB file is processed for a few seconds and then uploaded no problem. On a 30 MB or greater file it failed instantly.

Todd Klindt to the rescue he pointed me at this KB944981 - You cannot upload files that are larger than 28 MB on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that is running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

So I gave it a try and it actually made things worse. What the heck? Well then I reread it. They tell you to make a change to the web.config and say just put the change in the <configuration> section. WRONG! Well kind of. You need to make the change in the <configuration> section but it has to be after the </configSections> tag. So I recommend you paste their change between </configSections> and the <SharePoint> tag.

Now everything works great. Do note their change only allows you to upload files with a size of 50 MB. If you want larger you will need to increase the maxAllowedContentLength=.

If you are going to be playing with Windows Server 2008 and SharePoint I recommend you go poke around the SharePoint and w2k8 resource center at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb735844.aspx. Thanks to Emily Schroeder for the tweet on that page which she runs. J

Even better yet Todd and I have some fun new stuff coming on Windows Server 2008 and 64 bit before the end of the year.

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

This is one for your "that is odd" file.

Just finished installing MOSS 2007 on a fresh w2k8 server with SQL 2008. All 64 bit. I am hoping to build a dedicated production server for http://www.sharepoint911.com instead of the current prod, test, dev, try crazy stuff server we have. J

After I finished installing I ran configuration wizard and created a new farm successfully. When config wizard finished it automatically launched Central Admin and all was well. I started bouncing around starting services and such. The home page of central admin looked something like:

Notice those nice links for Services on server or Incoming mail. Just as things should be.

Then I closed the browser and opened it again and manually typed in the URL for central admin. Now look at the screen shot and the missing links in the Topology and Services section.

Over on the Application Management tab Create a web application is missing. Why?

Well some people have learned (the hard way) if you are not a local administrator on the central admin server you have the same missing links but since I was logged in as the same user that wasn't my issue. After about 10 minutes of beating my head on the table I did find the difference. When you go to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration it is actually running configuration wizard with the showcentraladmin parameter. Through the magic that is SharePoint this command is also setting Internet Explorers protected mode to Off. With it Off you get all of the links. When you navigate by typing in the URL to Central Admin in IE protected mode is On by default for the Local Intranet zone. With it On no links for you.

You want even stranger. When I open IE on my Vista desktop and navigate to central admin (on the remote server) by default the site opens in the Internet Zone with Protected Mode On and I still get all the proper links.

Hope this saves someone. On a bright note it has inspired my next post.

Shane – SharePoint Consulting