Archive for category Uncategorized

Pictures From SharePoint Saturday Indy. #SPSIndy

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on January 30, 2010

My pictures from today’s SharePoint Saturday Indy have been uploaded to the gallery. I have to apologize about the quality.  I decided to try something new and not be the annoying guy blinding the presenter with my large flash.  Unfortunately with the Lens I was using, I couldn’t really get any good shots in the low light of that building.  Most shots are at a noisy 1000 ISO and some are even at 3200.  My Canon 50D just isn’t that great at high ISO.  At the end I gave up and threw on the flash and tried bouncing it off the ceiling.  It was better but not great.  I guess next time I’ll have to turn back into annoying blinding flash dude.

Check’em out and if anyone would like a larger version of any pics, send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this post and I’ll get it to you.

THE GALLERY

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on December 24, 2009

I’m currently going through the Christmas Eve grind at work today.  I have zero motivation so not much is getting done.  My excuse is I’m waiting on a support call from a vender.  I can’t do anything to challenging or time consuming since they might call.  :)

This has been a pretty interesting year.  When I switched over to this blog for all of my technical posts, I figured I would pretty much lose all my readers.  I mean if my mom doesn’t need to wade through the tech posts to find the one somewhat interesting to her, that will significantly reduce my numbers. But instead of that happening, this has been one of the better years as far as readership goes.  I’m not quite sure what has caused it.  Was it the more focused posts or the content?  Was it due to my larger involvement in the tech community?  My guess is it is because I’ve taken a more active roll in social networking when it comes to tech.  Hopefully 2010 is an even better year.

Speaking of 2010, I think I may make a few minor changes to this blog.  I’ll still have the tech posts but I may toss in a few non-IT related ones.  I’m one of those guys with a lot of hobbies and I enjoy sharing them with people.  Because of that, you may end up seeing more posts related to them.  I’m into amature photography.  Also there are few things I love more than taking some pieces of wood and turning them into something beautiful and/or useful.  Once the weather gets warmer, I’ll get out to the shop more and possibly post about it on here a little.  We’ll see. Don’t worry about me getting too broad with my posts.  I’ll keep the more personal posts and political commentary elsewhere. 

Thank you all for reading and I’ll see you next year!

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Hopefully last ISA/SharePoint SSL Termination Search Issue Update

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on December 18, 2009

I’ve wrote about it HERE, HERE and HERE. And my last post was correct.  I installed the update on my test farm and it no longer experiences the search scope issue.  Had I known it was a bug and not my own fault, I would have contacted MS sooner. :)  

If you are still experiencing the problem, grab the December 2009 cumulative update and patch.

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Quick update to ISA and SSL termination issue

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on December 16, 2009

I posted about this a few times here.  More Here and Here.  This problem no longer affects my installation but it looks like Microsoft has released a fix.  The December cumulative updates for SharePoint state the following as an issue they fix:

When you try to perform a search in a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site, the “This List: Name of list, doclib etc.” scope for a list is missing. This issue occurs because https:// is used to visit the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site.

That looks an awful lot like what we were experiencing.  If you are still seeing this issue, try installing the latest updates and let us know if it fixes it.

Go HERE to get the updates.

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Find Exchange folders with a high item count

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on December 8, 2009

The Exchange team released a script yesterday that will find folders that exceed a specified limit. Check it out at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/12/07/453450.aspx. There is a PS equivalent that they post as well:

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics | Where {$_.ItemsInFolder -gt 5000} | Sort-Object -Property ItemsInFolder -Descending | fl Identity, ItemsInFolder

That searches the entire Org. You will want to specify specific servers or stores.

This will be incredibly helpful to help hunt down some performance issues you may be experiencing on some servers. Also it can allow you to be proactive in improving the experience for a user. I can’t imagine a user with 30,000 items in his mailbox is saying good things about your service. For the record, at this moment, I have 3 items in my inbox. It may be a record. I don’t think I’ve had it this low since the day I got it. It is such a great feeling.

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Update: Huey Lewis & The News @ the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on October 28, 2009

I did a dump of all my concert pictures at:

http://www.hugheserblog.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=32

A few of my favorites are in the previous post:

http://www.hugheserblog.com/2009/10/24/huey-lewis-the-news-the-microsoft-sharepoint-conference-2009/

If you would like a high quality version of any of these pics, let me know and I can send them your way.

Enjoy!

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Update: Quick rant about LSoft and Listserv

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on October 26, 2009

I’ve had to maintain a couple Listserv servers for the last few years.  Listserv hasn’t changed since the ’90s.  One thing that wasn’t thought of back then but is pretty common now are HTML e-mail clients. 

It is common for an HTML form that is requesting an e-mail address to do some basic verification.  It isn’t hard to code it to make sure the address is formatted as username@domain.xxx.  Also a quick check to make sure the address doesn’t include things like: mailto:username@domain.xxxwould be easy as well.  Unfortunately Listserv doesn’t do this check when accesping subscriptions via e-mail.  If you send a subscribe request in an HTML e-mail, it includes the markup.  Instead of seeing:

subscribe listname username@domain.xxx

It sees:

subscribe listname user...@domain.xxx<mailto:username@domain.xxx>

Obviously this is a bad address.  Listserv tries to process it, it fails and all of a sudden you have gigs of logs.  To clean this up, you have to find the addresses in the logs, delete them from the subscribers lists, and clear out messages from the queue.  That is what I’ve been doing the last couple hours. 

And just incase LSoft is listening, I have one other suggestion.  I appreciate you trying to keep the logs small but at least have the option to disable long log line truncation.  Right now if a line is to long, around 120 characters or so, instead of throwing in a line break or extending it, you throw up an (…) and end the line.  That isn’t acceptable.  Nothing frustrates me more knowing that the answer to the problem I’m experiencing is hidden behind a (…).   Please get rid of it or make it possible to disable that functionality.

</rant over>

Update: Thanks to Jacob Haller in the comments below, we have more info.  First off, the log truncation can be temporarily disabled using the debug_log_tcpgui keyword.  More information here: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/15.5/sitevars.html#cDebuglogtcpgui

Even better, in the next version, they will be correcting the bug with the HTML markup in subscribe messages.  That makes me incredibly happy.  It will save me so much time and I can’t wait until the next version.  Thank you LSoft.  It is good to see a company put forth the extra effort necessary to address their customers concerns.  Please make sure you read Jacob’s comment below.

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BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5 Virtualization

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on October 26, 2009

I’m currently sitting at the airport waiting on my flight home from a conference.  I still have quite awhile so I figured I would post something quick about BES on virtual hardware. 

It is fully supported on VMWare 3.5+ and mostly supported on VMWare 4.  In our environment, we have 2 primary BES servers with 2 failover at a regional datacenter.  SQL is also separate with a failover.  There is a new initiative to virtualize everything and my team decided that BES would make a good candidate.  For the most part, the hardware requirements for 1200 users was minimal.  When we did the BES 5 migration we decided to move off the physical hardware and go completely virtual. 

This hasn’t turned out well for us so far.  Even though we have a pretty massive VM environment, we are still having troubles.  It isn’t due to the most common problems you see.  We aren’t disk I/O bound.  We have plenty of memory and processing power.  Our problem is because of the network.  The BES servers need a pristine connection to your mail servers.  Normally they do but occasionally they hit some bottlenecks.  The BES servers can handle a few of these but if it is an outage lasting a few minutes or several shorter ones, it can cause the agents to hit the max 10 restarts per 24 hours.  When that happens, you have no choice but to restart.  This has happened to us more times than I can count.  Part of the reason is we have been running the hosts at their max.  That is something you should be able to do with VMWare but if it spikes, it can cause latency and kill the agents.  Another thing that has happened is our DR snapshotting software has issues.  It queries for changes every hour and if you have a lot of hosts, it can cause brief locks.  Even though it is only for a few seconds, it can still cause agent restarts.

Now I’m not saying don’t virtualize.  I’m not saying our problem is related to BES or even VMWare.  It is due to how we have VMWare implemented.  If you are running your hosts at their max, you might want to rethink virtualizing BES.  I would also recommend installing some networking monitoring software on hardware separate from the virtual hosts and see if you have any drop offs.  We experience the drop offs on other non BES services but it only affects the BES.

Virtualizing BES can save a lot of money but make sure you truly have that pristine connection.  Without it, you will have a lot of headaches.

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Huey Lewis & The News @ the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on October 24, 2009

Here are a few pictures from the concert.  Feel free to contact me if you want a higher quality version.

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WSUS 3.0 SP2 Upgrade Issue

Posted by Brian in Uncategorized on October 14, 2009

I ran into a problem while trying to install SP2 for WSUS 3.0 last night. I tried updating via WSUS as well as manually with the .exe. Neither worked. It would extract and then immediately give me an error telling me to look at the WSUSSetup.log. I did that and this is what I found:

2009-10-13 20:49:35 Success MWUSSetup Validating pre-requisites…
2009-10-13 20:49:35 Error MWUSSetup CUpgradeDriver::SaveWebSiteSetting: Failed to read ServerCertificateName registry value (Error 0×80070002: The system cannot find the file specified.)
2009-10-13 20:49:35 Error MWUSSetup CUpgradeDriver::PerformPresetupActions: SaveWebSiteSetting failed (Error 0×80070002: The system cannot find the file specified.)
2009-10-13 20:49:35 Error MWUSSetup CSetupDriver::LaunchSetup: Failed to perform pre-setup actions (Error 0×80070002: The system cannot find the file specified.)
2009-10-13 20:49:35 Error MWUSSetup CProgressManager::EnableCancel: GetDlgItem returning error (Error 0×80070578: Invalid window handle.)
2009-10-13 21:02:33 Error MWUSSetup CWatsonHelper::Init: Failed to load WER library. (Error 0x8007007E: The specified module could not be found.)
2009-10-13 21:02:33 Error MWUSSetup CSetupDriver::ReportFailure: Failed to initalize the CWatsonHelper. This is expected on pre-Vista machines. (Error 0×80004005: Unspecified error)
2009-10-13 21:02:33 Error MWUSSetup DoInstall: Wsus setup failed (Error 0×80070002: The system cannot find the file specified.)

The key part is “Failed to read ServerCertificateName registry value.” Unfortunately a Google or Bing search didn’t help at first. I figured it was an SSL issue so I decided to disable SSL on the IIS website. It still failed. I went back to Bing and clicked on the one link it found. It was in Dutch but thankfully Bing can translate it. The link recommended two things:

1. Do not require SSL on the individual folders under the IIS web site. Those are: 

  • ApiRemoting30
  • ClientWebService
  • DssAuthWebService
  • ServerSyncWebService
  • SimpleAuthWebService

2.  Run WSUSUtil.exe configureSSL <FQDN>

I did all that and restarted the machine. Next I ran the installer and it managed to run this time! The WSUSUtil.exe command also configured SSL so there was no need to go back and change everything back.

I did have one last snag.  Either I goofed and checked it or the util did but the content directory was set to require SSL.  WSUS checks for updates via SSL but downloads them via standard HTTP.  I unchecked that and the clients were able to update.

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