steve.clarke.weblog

Anyone who’s run the native SharePoint Backup and Restore utility knows that you have to install the SQL 2000 client tools on the server that the backup runs from. But what if the environment uses SQL Server 2005?

When I tried installing the client tools from the SQL Server 2005 install media, I kept getting an error on the install. So I went looking to see if Microsoft has any publicly available SQL 2005 client tools. Turns out a file from the Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 did the trick. Download the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components on the Feature Pack page and install. You should be good to go. Worked for me anyway… YMMV. :)

Posted by Steve at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found out this week that two of my co-workers and employees have received the Microsoft MVP for SharePoint!

Congratulations Amanda and Shane!

These MVP awards could not have gone to two more deserving people in the world. Amanda and Shane have been two of the strongest proponents, supporters, and users of SharePoint since the product’s inception. They have been prime movers in putting Infotech on the SharePoint map.

I’m so proud you you both.

Posted by Steve at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Until today, all my MOSS2007 installs have been using the simple SQL Express intalls. Today, while trying to install to a dedicated SQL Server 2005 box I kept getting an error when running the configuration wizard. There were a lot of different errors coming up: some about default collation, some about security, but the main error message was:

This access control list is not in canonical form and therefore cannot be modified.

I came across this entry on the Known Issues list for MOSS 2007:

This issue will occur if you are using Sysinternal’s Newsid utility to reset the SID of the machine or image.

To work around this issue do the following:

* Remove the Office Server Beta install.
* Join a workgroup.
* Remove machine account from domain.
* Run sysprep from Windows Support Tool's deploy.cab.
* Reboot and rejoin the domain.
* Install the Office Server Beta.

You can also build the server from scratch and not use NewSID.

Given that I have NewSID installed on all my base VS images to make quick deployment faster, I immediately recognized it as the source of my problem. I did as suggested and ran sysprep from deploy.cab. Deploy cab should be located on your Windows Server 2003 CD under the \SUPPORT\TOOLS folder.

Click on the “Reseal” button:

And select “OK” to regenerate the SIDs:

Make sure you have your install key available, plus your network settings, etc. because it’s going to take you through this part of the Windows install again.

I’ll re-run the setup again this afternoon and report back if it still doesn’t solve the problem.

Posted by Steve at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I noticed this new operation for the STSADM command line and wondered what it was exactly. As I hoped, it seems to be a mechanism to make it easier to rename a server hosting WSS. I’ve never had to do this in the ‘wild’, but I think it may solve a major pain in my reams of Virtual PC WSS/SPS images. I’ll try it out and report on the results.

Server renaming: Windows SharePoint Services version 3 now has an Stsadm renameserver command that makes it easier to rename your front-end servers and your back-end database servers. When you run Stsadm renameserver, the configuration database for your farm is updated so that any URLs or references to the old server name are now mapped to the new server name.

Posted by Steve at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I haven’t seen the WSS Admin documentation appear on MS Downloads yet, but after installing WSSv3 Beta 2 I quickly did a comparison of the STSADM.EXE operations with v2. Here is a quick list of new operations:

activatefeature
addalternatedomain
addcontentdb
addpermissionpolicy
addsolution
addzoneurl
authentication
backuphistory
blockedfilelist
canceldeployment
changepermissionpolicy
copyappbincontent
creategroup
databaserepair
deactivatefeature
deletealternatedomain
deletecontentdb
deletegroup
deletepermissionpolicy
deletesolution
deletezoneurl
deploysolution
deploywppack
displaysolution
enumalternatedomains
enumcontentdbs
enumdeployments
enumgroups
enumservices
enumsolutions
enumzoneurls
execadmsvcjobs
export
getsitelock
geturlzone
import
installfeature
managepermissionpolicylevel
migrateuser
provisionservice
registerwsswriter
renameserver
retractsolution
retractwppack
scanforfeatures
setapppassword
setsearchserver
setsitelock
setworkflowconfig
spsearch
syncsolution
uninstallfeature
unregisterwsswriter
updateaccountpassword
updatealerttemplates
updatefarmcredentials
upgradesolution

It looks like the SMIGRATE.EXE util has been replaced with STSADM -o export|import.

I’ll be poking around a bit with the new version and report anything interesting that comes up.

Posted by Steve at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patrick Tisseghem has some good reflections on the SharePoint announcments coming from the PDC.

“Some will see new challenges and opportunities, others see there current solutions melt away as Microsoft is delivering that specific functionality out-of-the-box. It is probably time for many companies doing SharePoint stuff, to reflect on where to go from here. My advise to them is not to panic. Yes, Microsoft is filling up the gaps and to me, there will be less demand from customers to extend WSS or SPS in a horizontal way to deliver something that ‘Microsoft should have done’. Good example of this in the current version is item-level security or security trimming of the UI. To me the real opportunities are in the building of vertical solutions on top of the WSS platform.”

Posted by Steve at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been sitting on an automated SharePoint Portal Server backup script for a while, considering whether or not I'd release it to the community. The problem was that I wasn't happy with the amount of error trapping that it was doing.

I finally took a few hours over the last few days to polish the scripts to the point that they do a pretty decent level of error trapping and logging, including e-mailing the results of the log file, and adding appropriate entries to the event log.

This script will backup:

• The portal using the SPSBackup utility


• The IIS Metabase


• The computer's System State using NTBackup


• Template and Config, Inetpub, log, and other miscellaneous files not backed up by SPSBackup

Posted by Steve at 01:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Let's say you've created a SharePoint site and assigned a quota of 3GB, "just in case they need it". Now let's say the site currently contains 788MB worth of files.
Q: How much disk space does it consume in the database?
A: 3GB. Try exporting it using STSADM and you'll find that the backup file is approximately 3GB.

This is something you should be aware of when setting quotas.

Posted by Steve at 08:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've released an update to SharePointFav with a few minor changes:

Well, ok, not my first bug (by faaaar), but I've found an issue in SharePointFav where it won't add a URL with a comma to a SharePoint list. I'm working on a fix and will release a replacement executable when ready.

I've also improved usability a bit by changing the Category dropdown to allow selection by clicking anywhere on the control. That was put in there for me, because I'm just too lazy to have to hunt for that little drop-down arrow.

If you're wondering why the configuration of Categories is so darn tedious it's because I still haven't worked out the ideal mechanism for tracking your personal list of SharePoint links lists. Before I implement a nice little GUI to maintain your Categories, I want to think through the possibility of using another SharePoint list to track your links lists. Or maybe I could use a combination of both. I'd welcome any ideas on a nice clean way of managing the whole concept of tracking your collection of SharePoint lists.

Posted by Steve at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I have SharePointFav integrated with the Internet Explorer context menu, but it would be nice to have it from Mozilla/FireFox as well. I did a bit of preliminary "Googling" to find out how to do this, but so far haven't turned up anything useful. Does anyone out there know where I can find this?

Posted by Steve at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I started working on SharePointFav, I find myself constantly typing SharePoint as "ShavePoint". For me - a 33 year old going on 17 - that's about once every 3 days. :)

Posted by Steve at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've finally got something that I'm ready to release as SharePointFav version 1.0. SharePointFav is a client side application designed to allow you to add an Internet Explorer Favorite URL to a SharePoint list.

First of all, I'll give a bit of background on why I decided to write this program. As I've been working on various parts of the SharePoint platform I've inevitably come across all kinds of helpful web site links. Often, I'll take a URL and forward it to people on the team or add it to our SharePoint Developer Center links list. When I was adding a favorite to a links list one day, I thought, "I should be able to do this directly from Internet Explorer, just like I subscribe to an RSS feed in Newsgator." Thus was born SharePointFav.

Adding a URL to a SharePoint list has several obvious benefits:

I've been doing a bunch of SharePoint programming recently. One of the small apps I'm working on is a utility that allows you to right-click on any page in Internet Explorer and save the link to a SharePoint link library.

I think SharePoint is the ideal location to save bookmarks to. I rarely save a bookmark to my local machine anymore because my list has grown so big and wieldly that I end up googling everything anyway. I also found a need to share links with co-workers as we're working on projects. With this utility I can choose to save, say, links relating to SharePoint development to our SharePoint developer team site.

When I get it in decent enough shape, I'll post it here.

Posted by Steve at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)