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Citric SharePoint Services > Citric Blog
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| The team's thoughts, ideas and musings |
04/04/2008
In December we installed a large server farm on a customer site using the Enterprise version of MOSS 2007, on Windows 2003 R2 x64, including MOSS/WSS 3 SP1. Everything was working well when we shutdown for Christmas.
When we came back in January to carry on the configuration, we had two problems:
My Sites were returning the error: "The evaluation version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for this server has expired"
And performing any searches would result in the error: "Your search cannot be completed because of a service error"
Now we went through everything on the farm with a fine tooth comb, recreating accounts, reinstalling service packs etc - even to the point where we got Microsoft to confirm the keys we had used were valid.
In the end, exasperated, we raised a support call with Microsoft, and their first question was "Is Portalshield installed?" which it was. It was actually deployed in our absence, and we never even considered it would be related, as the error messages didn't indicate it as a potential cause.
MS's suggestion was to change the Path statement, so that the WSS BIN path doesn't appear at the end. This didn't work, so we uninstalled Portalshield, and My sites and Search returned. Losing Portalshield wasn't a short-term problem, as the first portal was purely internal.
for details. You'll need to raise a support call to get the fix unfortunately, but as we've recreated this on every x64 system we've tried it on so far, I'd imagine they'd need to put it on general release soon.
McAfee too refer to a problem with the path statement, which seems to imply significant differences between the x86 and x64 versions of MOSS - Portalshield/MOSS are fine on 32 bit machines. 19/04/2007We've had some fun today setting up our existing secondary SMTP server to double up as a POP3 server for a new domain. Actually setting the POP3 service up is a doddle. It's also pretty simple to set up the MX records to get mail to actually arrive on the server. What we couldn't work out was why mail was just sitting in the SMTP queue and not being delivered to the drop directory. We were thinking things like it must be a problem with the DNS name, or service binding (the server has two NICs and about 10 IP addresses, and services incoming mail for about 15 domains).
Looking at the logs revealed little. Then I remembered, because we use Exchange for all our other email domains, we use LDAP routing on the SMTP servers to check whether the email account exists in AD before sending it to the Exchange server – a quite useful anti-spam measure, that stops the Exchange server getting nonsense emails. However, in this case we were setting up POP3 users using the password file method (its intended for hosting clients) so they had no account or email address in AD – so the SMTP server didn't know what to do. Turning this feature off (LDAP Routing) and restarting the SMTP service did the trick, and mail instantly arrived in the appropriate POP3 box.
The final thing we implemented was email domain quotas. This means the whole domain shares a quota, rather than each user being limited to a certain amount. Again this is made slightly trickier by using the password file method. First, you have to create a local account on the POP3 server – we've named ours after the corresponding domain. Then, enable disk quotas on the volume containing the POP3 boxes (C: if you haven't changed anything). Then add a new quota entry for this new user – 10MB per mailbox is generally the case. Then use the WINPOP utility to create a quota file for one of your email accounts, and associate this with the user account as follows:
WINPOP createquotafile user@domainname.com /user:useraccount
This will create a quotafile in the corresponding email accounts mailbox folder – copy this file and put it in each mailbox you create that this quota applies to, and the quota will apply to all those boxes. 13/04/2007The commerce kit we've used in the past to base our e-commerce solutions on has been updated to DotNet 2.0 and become a full open-source project. It now supports credit-card payments through a provider model, along with a load of new features. Its available here Whilst looking through the showcase on the Microsoft Ajax site I came across this site (because it's about mountain biking in the UK) and wondered how they did the maps. Turns out they use the Virtual Earth SDK, which is very powerful, but unfortunately is implemented through client side javascript. Luckily though some clever chap has already written an ASP.DotNet/Ajax server control that makes things a lot easier here. This should mean it's very easy to pop maps/directions/location indicators on any web page using server side code to populate the data.
Ideas for use:
- The static maps we regularly put on "Contact Us" pages for directions could be replaced with dynamic maps with driving directions from the user's current location.
- The websites we have with databases of location information are obvious candidates for updating with this technology.
If you see this message displayed in IE7 for internal websites (or published sites such as OWA or Team Services) this is because (1) the computer you are using doesn't trust the issuing authority of the website's certificate, or (2) you are using the internal name and the certificate has the full DNS or external name. In either case, it's OK to continue by clicking on the "Continue to this website". Long term the fix is either to (1) download the certificate authority's root certificate and add it to the machine's list of trusted root authorities, or (2) use the correct name of the site, as on the certificate.
Of course, there's always a 3rd reason – the certificate may have expired, in which case it will need renewing from the server.
I think I've seen this problem with deploying SpotCheck from the TAP website, when asking clients to use the secure (https) address to reach the deployment page. This KB article describes how a common Internet Explorer security setting ("Warn if changing between secure and not secure mode") can stop the ClickOnce setup in its tracks if the deployment manifest file contains a different URL to the calling page i.e. if the deployment page is secure but points to a non-secured manifest file. Changing service accounts in the SharePoint 2003 used to be a nightmare, as it was all done manually, and you had to find every instance through the interface and change them all at the same time. It seems Microsoft have thought about this more in the new version and have included it as part of the command-line processes. Then they have documented the process as a KB article here . This is useful if any of the service accounts have expired or the SQL account is no longer valid. 04/04/2007
Every blog has to start somewhere, and this is the start of this one. Hopefully this will be the first of many posts, and lets hope too that they are more interesting and informative than this one.
If you are reading this and wondering what's the best way to add to the blog, you'll need two things:
- A WSS account with Citric
- To sign in with this account – click sign-in on the top right if you have an account
Once you've signed in you should see the admin links on the right. These let you create new posts and also use a blog program to post. If you have Word 2007, this will do the job nicely. Then you can create better posts than this one!
To begin using your site, click Create a Post under Admin Links to the right.
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Blogs are typically displayed in reverse chronological order (newest entries first), and consist of frequent short postings. With this Blog, it is also possible for your site visitors to comment on your postings.
In business, Blogs can be used as a team communication tool. Keep team members in touch by providing a central place for links, relevant news, and even gossip.
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