Failed Detection of PeopleILM Components and User Profile Synchronisation Service DCOM 10016 Errors

In my last post, I described some of the security considerations that influence an administrator’s response to event log clutter generated by DCOM errors. There are known remedial steps for most of these errors, but the impact of fixing them is often poorly understood, so I tried to clear some of that up. In this post, I’ll review how I’ve responded to the User Profile Synchronisation Service’s DCOM 10016 errors and the corollary MsiInstaller warnings with these security considerations in mind.

Failed Detection of PeopleILM Components

According to Microsoft KB article 2473430, these events occur, “while attempting to manage a User Profile Service Application”. To be more specific, the symptoms are described as:

When you attempt to manage the User Profile Service Application via Central Admin on a SharePoint Server 2010 with the User Profile Synchronization service started after an IISReset, the following warnings are logged in the application log of the SharePoint server…

Personally, I’ve never been able to pin down a firm cause of these events, so I’m happy to go with this Microsoft description, although I struggled to replicate this recently. Regardless, I’ve certainly seen the events in a large number, if not all User Profile Synchronisation Service instances I’ve encountered/built. One thing I find interesting is that these MsiInstaller warnings are accompanied by DCOM 10016 errors on the Windows Installer Service (DCOM component {000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}) and a few MsiInstaller warnings that closely resemble the Product Version Job DCOM permission errors I’ve spoken to before. This is what we’re looking at:

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DCOM Security for SharePoint Administrators

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.

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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.

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