Tristan Watkins on IT Infrastructure - Page 9 of 13 - Technical guidance for Microsoft security technologies, Windows, SharePoint, and other generally useful findings

SharePoint 2010 IT-Pro Ignite Training

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. Sorry about the long delay. The holidays kind of took over for a bit and I lost track of this mostly-completed post in my drafts.

Anyway… In early December I attended a virtual SharePoint 2010 IT-Pro Ignite training that coincided with a physical session in Bangalore. For those who aren’t aware, Microsoft offered a limited number of these slots to select partners, with IT Pro and Developer tracks. This is approximately 40 hours of training provided by Microsoft free of charge (for the physical sessions, travel and accommodation need to be provided by the student). Note: none of this is under NDA. There were additional Virtual Ignite slots made available to a wider audience in early 2010, but I’m not certain what availability of those slots is looking like now. We were told in the training that all of the collateral (or similar) will be made public by RTM.

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SharePoint Server 2007 cross-domain farm topologies

I’ve recently been involved in MOSS 2007 farm topology discussions with a client that was interested in using the Split back-to-back topology. After a lengthy troubleshooting and escalation process we’ve identified some problems with this TechNet extranet farm topology guidance in conjunction with Microsoft Tier 2 support. In short, the TechNet document identifies some supported topologies that span domains, but this incident has raised questions about:

The acceptable placement of server roles in those topologies.
Supported domain trust directions.
Alternate Access Mappings requirements.
Picking people from other domains.

This is an account of the relevant issues and the steps that we took to reach our conclusions. Continue reading “SharePoint Server 2007 cross-domain farm topologies”

Hyphens in domain names get trimmed from account names in SharePoint 2010 User Profile Import

We’ve identified that the user profile import in the SharePoint 2010 public beta can’t handle hyphens in domain names. The import will succeed but the portion of the domain name preceding the hyphen will get trimmed. When a user logs on a new profile is created but it is orphaned from the imported data. In principal we’ve been able to work around this by migrating the user profiles with STSADM (thanks to my colleague Martin Hatch for the suggestion) but we haven’t put this approach to the test over a sufficient period of time to be able to recommend it firmly yet. We also don’t have a mechanism for triggering the update for newly-imported users but it shouldn’t be rocket science to come up with a solution to that problem for the duration of the beta.

Microsoft have confirmed this is a problem in the SharePoint 2010 public beta and that a fix will be included in the next release. Their response was on a closed beta forum, so I can’t include that detail here, but this is my description from MSDN: Continue reading “Hyphens in domain names get trimmed from account names in SharePoint 2010 User Profile Import”

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part VI: Issues and Results

In the first five parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build, automated deployment and the guest virtual machine build. In this post I review some of the questions and issues we’ve encountered after a few months of working this way and some overall reflections on the approach. Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part VI: Issues and Results”

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part V: Guest Build

In the first four parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build and automated deployment. In this post I describe a SharePoint 2007 virtual machine build.

Where’s the SharePoint 2010 build?

In short, we’re working on it. I’ve produced a new SharePoint 2010 beta virtual machine for this environment but we’re not yet ready to publish build guidance. Stay tuned. Additionally… Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part V: Guest Build”

Can a hardened server play a SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Media Web Part?

The answer, obviously enough, is that it can if it has Silverlight installed. Read on if you’re interested in how the web part will behave in its absence.

Continue reading “Can a hardened server play a SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Media Web Part?”

The definitive word on Hyper-V high-end graphics performance

The Microsoft virtualisation team are certainly taking community engagement and transparency seriously these days. I’m happy to report that Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) has posted the definitive summary of Hyper-V high-end graphics performance issues. He was the first person to discover the issue and has produced most of the guidance on it since. Key things to note:

It’s not an issue on processors with SLAT, but these are only just hitting the market in laptops in the near future
It’s not an issue with the SVGA driver
- I’ve asked if the SVGA driver might ever offer multi-monitor support. He’s looking in to it. This might be a great compromise until processors with SLAT become ubiquitous
This same problem occurs in all native Hypervisors
- Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation do not have the same problem but they are Type 2 hypervisors and do not offer the same performance as Hyper-V

So… there’s still no conclusive solution but it’s good to have the full context of the problem. For more background on why this matters for SharePoint see my previous post on the matter.

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part IV: Automated deployment

In the first three parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. In this section I will look at automating deployment of that host operating system. This is lengthy, but there’s a lot to cover.

Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part IV: Automated deployment”

Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010 and ULS log changes

SharePoint 2010 ULS logging adds a very useful new column called the Correlation ID. The ID tracks a request and greatly simplifies finding detailed error logging in SharePoint trace logs. Additionally, Mattias Karlson points out that there’s a new CodePlex project called ULSViewer which parses SharePoint 2010 logs in a friendly view.

The correlation ID in a SharePoint 2010 error message:

The Trace logs in ULS Viewer, filtered by the Correlation ID:

NewSID myth implications for SharePoint development

It’s now a week on from Mark Russinovich’s NewSID retirement announcement and I’ve been watching the feedback since. To give a brief overview, it’s long been a tenant of machine cloning processes that a new machine SID should be generated for each clone in order to prevent conflicts. Mark Russinovich wrote the original NewSID tool for Windows NT and as a Microsoft Technical Fellow today, he supposed that it might not be needed anymore and investigated the implications of retiring it. Obviously, if you haven’t read it yet and you work with machine cloning, you should read the article, but if you haven’t found the time to sift through the 168 comments (and counting), this summary might help clarify things:

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