Monday, November 13, 2006 8:18 PM
So tonight we are rolling our Sharepoint Server 2007 B2TR implemenation to production. The whole week things have been clicking along and going very well (which usually boads badly for the actual push..)
Well right out of the gate the good feelings came crashing down when when one of the testers tried to enter the site through the anonymous access side.
To test this, I made sure that the site was not added to my Internet Explorer site categories for Intranet, and in the options made sure that it would only try to connect to the site with Anonymous Access.
Typed in the site path in the URL address bar and BOOM!
All you get on the page was "401 Unauthorized".
After about an hour of messing with it, the Avanade consultant that has been leading us through this project remembered an issue that we had a few days ago and I had sought out on the net when we saw some strange behaviour in the portal.
The problem wound up being.....
Default.master
Yep, here is the problem. During the day the default.master was checked out to make some last minute feel good changes for the production roll. The problem is that it was updated and checked in, but not published. Since anyone that was on the site had enough permissions to see the pages (with the updated default.master in draft state) we never noticed that it wasn't published. Once the file was published and was available for every Tom, Dick, and Jane to see all of the Anonymous Access problems went away.
I would say unless someone can come up with a very good excuse why this doesn't just show the last published version of the default.master until the newer draft version is published, I would call this a pretty decent BUG!
I am hoping that in RTM it is fixed, but we won't know that for a couple of days when we start to install the RTM upgrade.
Overall, I would say I am 99.99998% happy with MOSS 2007, but the little things like this get my undies in a bunch. The SharePoint team has done a great job either way. If you get a chance to play with 2007, do it. It is by far and away better than 2003.
Tip of the night? If you get caught playing with you default.master, remember to publish it!
Michael