SharePoint

Access Denied Running STSADM in WS2008

Peter K — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:56:01 GMT

Hopefully this will help those of you who are running Windows Server 2008 and are getting "Access Denied" errors when trying to run any command in STSADM.

Make sure you're running the command prompt as an administrator (Right click command prompt in the start menu and select "Run as Administrator..."
Make sure the username you're running under is set as farm administrator as well as a local administrator on the server.
Make sure User Account Control is switched off (Control Panel > User Accounts). This is only really necessary if the above didn't work.

There was also a bug in older builds of MOSS 2007 (and possibly WSS 3.0?) that under specific conditions would cause Access Denied errors when running certain STSADM operation such as "import". These can be fixed by patching to SP2.

Operation Aborted Error When Exporting a Site using STSADM

Peter K — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:27:42 GMT

Was trying to export a site in WSS3.0 using the following command:

stsadm.exe -o export -url http://blah/blah -filename BlahBackup -includeusersecurity

Which promptly spit this out:

Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004004 (E_ABORT))

This seems to be a fairly generic error, I was finding causes ranging from SQL Log file size to threading conflicts. The most common solution was to shrink the SQL log size of the content database of the site you're exporting. In my case this wasn't the cause of the error, instead what solved it was running the above command as a user who has DB_owner permissions to the content database.

Configure Windows SharePoint Services Search Service Settings

Peter K — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:06:04 GMT

By default, the search service is disabled in WSS 3.0. In order to enable it, goto your SharePoint Central Administration page and under the Operations tab, goto the "Services on the Server" list and click on WSS Search.

Service Account - You cannot use any built in accounts when specifiying the Service Account, however you can use local accounts. One account you can choose to use is the default Administrator account on your server, "myserver\Administrator".
Content Access Account - Use an account that has full read access to your SharePoint Content Databases. As a security precaution, try not to use an account that has write permissions on the database. For example: "mydomain\sqlserveruser".
Search Database - In most cases the default settings will work, change them as required.
Indexing Schedule - No new files will be searchable until they are indexed, depending on the load you wish to put on the server you can set this to be done as often as you want.

Upon submitting the form, the search service should start and begin indexing the content in your SharePoint site. Now would be a good time to install the Adobe IFilter to allow your search service be able to index PDF files, the earlier you install it the better, since it will only recognize PDF files added after the addon was installed.