In a server administrator’s never-ending battle with log clutter, DCOM errors have proven to be some of the most persistent and poorly-understood events – especially with SharePoint. Our community has been building up remedial practices for the most common of these errors, but changes to the number and complexity of these fixes over the last few years call for a deeper look at what we’re changing, and the effects of these changes beyond a reduction in red and yellow icons in the event logs. In this post I’ll talk about some of the fundamental concepts from a Systems dude’s perspective and along the way I hope to convey a better understanding of Windows itself.
June 8th, 2011
SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance: SSD, i5 vs. i7, WEI and Sandy Bridge
Late last year my colleagues and I tried to distil the tasks that impede SharePoint developer productivity. Then I ran those tests on EC2, Hyper-V and VMware Workstation, with the latter two virtualisation technologies running on a desktop, an older laptop and a newer laptop. In this post I hope to shed a bit of light on some follow-up testing that I’ve squeezed in to the odd hour here and there over the last six months. Unfortunately hardware availability and my schedule have not aligned to produce a further round of comprehensive tests and since I can’t see that occurring in the immediate future I’m going to fill in some gaps here with a couple of additional concrete findings, particularly regarding i5 vs. i7 testing and the impact of SSD on first page load times after application pool recycles. I’ll also talk less rigorously about a few related issues.
read more »
Hardware, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 
3 Comments »
June 2nd, 2011
Active Directory Account Creation Mode in SharePoint 2010
Earlier this week, I had the misfortune of generating an error I’d never seen before when building a new SharePoint Server 2010 farm. The error first emerged when the SharePoint installation process landed me at the Farm Configuration Wizard page. I wouldn’t have been running it (not advisable ever, really), but it’s the first page that loads after the Product Configuration Wizard completes, so my first Central Administration page was this error:
The page cannot be displayed because your server’s current configuration does not support it. To perform this task, use the command line operations in Stsadm.exe.
How odd, given the emphasis on PowerShell in SharePoint 2010! After a bit of head scratching and examining application and ULS logs, I navigated to the Central Admin home page and everything appeared to be fine, but then when I got around to creating a new Site Collection a bit later, I got the same error, even though I was able to create web/service applications. I had the same error when logged on as farm admin, farm admin + local admin rights, farm admin + SQL SysAdmin and farm admin + domain admin rights, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a permission issue (and I should note my temporary fiddlery here is only really suitable for non-production environments). This error also occurred on some other Site Collection-specific pages.
April 5th, 2011
SharePoint Server 2010 Search Scopes and Pre-Windows 2000 Compatibility Access
Back in the pre-release days of SharePoint 2010, one of the most reliable sources of information on infrastructure issues was Russ Maxwell’s SharePoint Brew blog. It’s still a great resource, although he’s posting less frequently now than he was during the beta. In this post I want to share my findings regarding Pre-Windows 2000 Compatibility Access group rights in Active Directory. Everything I have to say is supplementary to Russ’s foundational explanation of Why the tokenGroupsGlobalAndUniversal (TGGAU) attribute matters in SharePoint 2010. I’m picking the discussion up from his closing comment, “At a minimum, certain service accounts like the search service account need to be a member of this group.”
March 17th, 2011
Amazon VPC and VM Import Updates
In the last couple of weeks I’ve received notification of two important updates regarding Amazon Web Services. I thought I’d share them here, as they are both relevant to use of SharePoint 2010 on EC2 and I’ve seen no mention of them elsewhere. If you’re interested in this broader topic, I’ve covered it in detail here:
- SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part I: Storage and Provisioning
- SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part II: Cloning and Networking
- SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part III: Administration, Delegation and Licensing
- SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part IV: Cost Analysis
My commentary here assumes some familiarity with these earlier posts. This is new functionality that enables new design options. These options should make SharePoint 2010 on EC2 more appealing for a few specific uses.
Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint | 8 Comments »
March 16th, 2011
People Search Result Organisation Browser Link Doesn’t Respect Alternate Access Mappings
My colleague Anthony Clegg and I have recently been working on a project together, for which I’ve designed and delivered the infrastructure, while he’s been delivering the solution. As part of my design, I extended the SharePoint Web Applications from the default HTTPS zones to new HTTP zones, exclusively for crawling. This approach has been around for some time, but there’s a new wrinkle on the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search Centre People Search results page, which I’ll discuss here:
Consultancy and Design, Performance, SharePoint | 4 Comments »
March 15th, 2011
Exams 70-667 and 70-668
I’ve just completed exams 70-667 and 70-668 yesterday and today, making me an MCITP: SharePoint Administrator 2010. Woohoo! But this is not an own-horn-tooting exercise; I have a tip to offer on sitting these exams.
As I started preparing for these exams last week, I was under the misapprehension that there was very little in the way of guidance on the Microsoft Learning site. I think I perceived things this way because there wasn’t much to go on when the exams were first launched. But when I checked again last week I was happy to find a link to a learning plan from the Preparation Materials tab of the 70-667 page. Unfortunately, the 70-668 page does not contain a link to a learning plan (it’s listed but unlinked), but it does exist! I just searched for it on the Training Catalogue.
March 3rd, 2011
Conficker Protection Breaks Search
A couple of months ago I was happily building a client’s SharePoint Server 2010 farm when I stumbled at Search. The Service Application provisioned fine, but when I pushed out topology changes I started to have problems. Later, these problems returned in different forms, but the root cause appears to have been consistent. In this post I will review the symptoms, the single fix and the reason why this issue emerged in this environment. I’ll also look at some unexpected permission changes that occur when new servers receive Search Service Instances.
February 19th, 2011
Testing Manage Patch Status
In my last post I discussed how the Product Version Job timer job uses the Windows Installer Service to query the installed state of SharePoint 2010 servers and how the Manage Patch Status page in Central Administration displays this information. I also touched on my reservations about what we can infer from this data. In this post, I’m diving a bit deeper in to that question.
read more »
February 15th, 2011
Inside Manage Patch Status
Back in August, I stumbled across a new type of DCOM 10016 error in SharePoint 2010, caused by the Product Version Job timer job. When I found the error, I was primarily concerned with keeping my event logs clean. Since then, the inelegance of my original work-around and the incomplete picture I contented myself with at the time began to nag at me, but I only recently started digging deeper, prompted largely by the fact that this topic has generated more traffic to my blog in the last quarter than any other.