Paul Lee

IIS Service Unavailable

Paul Lee — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:39:00 GMT

I found a great post on how to troubleshoot the "503 Service Unavailable" error.

http://blogs.iis.net/brian-murphy-booth/archive/2007/03/22/how-to-troubleshoot-an-iis-event-id-1009-error.aspx

I'm putting this link up mostly so I can easily find it next time I have this issue. :)

Tomcat SSL Cache - Cannot download PDF

Paul Lee — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:57:26 GMT

I've fixed this error so many times and have had to search the internet for the fix everytime that I've finally decided to log it into my own blog. Mainly so I can easily find it.

Here's the problem. As a general rule, all https applications do not cache any pages for security reasons. This leaves the issue of downloading files from a https site. For example, if you try to download a file (pdf, xls, doc, etc) from any site, your computer will download it to cache before opening it with the associated application. So specifically in a Tomcat ssl site, you will get this error (or something like this):

Tomcat is automatic adding a Pragma: no-cache header to your page. Here is the link with the fix.

So where ever the <context> of your web application is defined, you want to add something like this:

And of course you can change BasicAuthenticator to FormAuthenticator or DigestAuthenticator depending on what you are using.

Hopes this helps someone.

Sharepoint cannot resolve AD security group

Paul Lee — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:15:04 GMT

I was banging my head against the wall over this one for a few days. There was a particular AD security group (over 1000 users) that sharepoint could not resolve. Nothing about it (so I thought) was different than any of the groups that sharepoint could resolve. Same setup, OU and everything.

Finally, I realized that the Alias name was not the same as the standard object name which is called the "Pre-Windows 2000" name in Active Directory.

In 99% of all the cases, these are the same. For some reason, this time they weren't.

Hope this saves someone some grief.

MOSS - corrupt memory errors

Paul Lee — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:26:38 GMT

Today my index server started to show this error in the event logs:

Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

More or less the same error in three separate events:

Event ID 6398

Event ID 6482

Event ID 7076

I did a quick search on the web and found this fix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/946517

Seems to work but I'm still not sure why this started to happen all of a sudden.

My environment: Server 2003 SP2, MOSS SP1, Feb CU

Make a subfolder hierarchy inherit from parent

Paul Lee — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:02:29 GMT

I have been involved in a huge public folder migration project for my company. One particular folder I migrated had a hierarchy of 1500 subfolders. The migration tool was nice enough to migrate the permissions for me for each folder into sharepoint. Cool, right? Yes until my manager told me he just wanted to manage the parent folder in sharepoint and have the subfolders inherit everything. There is nothing in sharepoint out-of-the-box that lets you do this in one shot. Now there are probably many 3rd party sharepoint admin tools that will do this. But here is the poor man's way. Simple IronPython script.

import clr

clr.AddReference("Microsoft.SharePoint")
from Microsoft.SharePoint import SPSite

siteurl = '<url to site>'
url= '<url to doclib>'

site = SPSite(siteurl)
web = site.OpenWeb()

docLib = web.GetList(url)

myfolders = docLib.Folders

for furl in myfolders:
furl.ResetRoleInheritance()

That's it! Took me only 10 minutes to write...without knowing much about the sharepoint API. The first 3 lines is the key here that lets you hook into the .NET framework and the sharepoint API.

Please read my original post for a guide on installing (if you can call it that) IronPython.

Sharepoint Datasheet view errors

Paul Lee — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:42:38 GMT

Here's the error from one of my users:

The list is displayed in Standard view. It cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed, your browser does not support ActiveX controls, or support for ActiveX controls is disabled.

This just started happening this week. Only for one user. No recent patches on the sharepoint server.

If you search this on the internet, you get tons of results but nothing simple. I went through this good article, http://www.sharepointblogs.com/wsspectacular/archive/2008/04/14/when-datasheets-go-bad.aspx but nothing worked. Frustrating....

Then a local IT guy asked me if I tried clearing the Internet Explorer cache. Tried it and it worked!!!

Lesson: Try clearing the IE cache first before trying all the other stuff. May save you alot of time.

Server environment: WSS 2.0, server 2003

Client environment: XP, Office 2003

IronPython - Sharepoint programming for the rest of us

Paul Lee — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:35:55 GMT

For those of us who want to start programming sharepoint but get intimidated by the extensive setup needed to begin with C# and visual studio, IronPython is for you. Frankly, I have been too lazy to take on the task of installing and configuring visual studio on a VM with MOSS.

My background(many moons ago) is java development. I'm not a python expert. Nor am I a sharepoint programming expert. I may not even be considered a java expert anymore. And I'm definitely not a C# or .NET guy. I'm writing about iron python because it has been so easy for me to bang out useful scripts without having to get into the complexities(at least for me) of Visual Studio and .NET.

For the C# or python developers, you will probably laugh at the code I will be posting. My intention here is to show how easy it is write a script to do something useful. Hopefully my code will get better as I learn more.

Also, just to be clear, you will not be creating huge sharepoint programs or features with iron python. To do that, you will still need visual studio and C#.

So what is IronPython good for? I have been able to create scripts that do basic administrative tasks that sharepoint doesn't provide out-of-the-box. I know there are many other vendor tools out there that fill in these administrative gaps of sharepoint but my company is not spending any money these days.

Here's how to get started:

- download IronPython on your MOSS (dev or uat) server- The zipped version will do. I think if you use 2.0 and up, you will need the latest version of .NET which is not required for MOSS. I am using 1.1.2 because of this. Yes, I'm lazy...

- Just unzip the folder somewhere and you're done. You can test it by double clicking ipy.exe.

Type:

print "Hello World"

That's it! You've just installed and written the defacto Hello world program. Easy right? It gets better. I'll begin posting all the scripts I've written using the sharepoint API and explaining how easy it was to write it. Stay tuned...

For those of you that want to get more technical with IronPython or just Python, here are some links:

www.python.org - Official Python site.

http://ironpython.codeplex.com/ - Official IronPython site.

http://www.diveintopython.org/ - Good free Python book.

Be sure to have the API's handy.
WSS - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms441339.aspx
MOSS - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms550992.aspx

Stsadm createsite doesn't create default groups

Paul Lee — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:11:53 GMT

If you use:

stsadm -o createsite [required fields] -sitetemplate STS#0

to create your site collections, the default groups are missing (Owners, Visitors, Members).

If you create your site collections without the -sitetemplate option, when you first visit the site, you get a page to choose a site template followed by a page to to setup the default groups for the site. Nice.

If you're like me, you create 50 sites with the -sitetemplate option before figuring out there are no default groups....

So what I figured out was that you can paste this to your groupless site collection url:

/_layouts/permsetup.aspx

This will get you to the default group creation page. Just click OK. Hopes this helps someone.

My environment: MOSS with Feb CU on server 2003.

Sharepoint Crawls stop working - Part 2

Paul Lee — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:38:03 GMT

Environment: SIngle server farm - Windows 2003 - MOSS SP1

I found another server with the same "access denied" error in the crawl logs. So I applied the Loopback fix but then another error:

The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070003)

After searching the internet, I found the solution. You have to make sure the "gthrsvc" folder exists under your search account's Temp directory. Then restart the search service.

CMD> net stop osearch

CMD> net start osearch

Then run full crawl. Worked for me.

I think this is another side effect of one of the recent server patches. This particular server has been around for a while and the crawls never had a problem until now. Going to check the rest of my MOSS servers now...

Sharepoint lists stop receiving emails

Paul Lee — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:47:45 GMT

Got woken up this morning by frantic people in Amsterdam. Their document libraries stopped receiving emails!

First thing I checked was to make sure emails were still making it to the sharepoint server. To the IIS drop box at least... So I sent a test email there.

Yep, they were definitely getting there. And they were disappearing too so that means the timer service was working and picking them up. So where the hell were they going?

So I throttled the email events:

After sending another test email, here's what showed up in the event logs:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3
Event Category: E-Mail
Event ID: 6873
Date:  4/20/2009
Time:  3:15:26 PM
User:  N/A
Computer: XXXXXXXXXXX
Description:
An error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Drop\f83e047f01c9c1b9000000bb.eml. The error was: Unknown alias..

The event type was Warning. This is just a Warning?!?!?

Here's what I found out before calling premier and before doing any more research on this. If you go to the Incoming email settings of the document library:

You can just click OK on the settings page without changing anything and emails will magically start working again. Wow. What a fix! The best thing is that the end users can do this themselves. :) So I called them and asked them to go to each of the document libraries and do this.

Here's the real cause and fix for this after doing some research. Occasionally, the email addresses in the config db can get deleted (corrupt) without warning.

The quick fix is:

stsadm -o refreshdms -url <url of web application>

The permanent fix is to install the hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961750 or even better, install the Feb CU and get it over with.

Apparently, if sharepoint doesn't know what to do with an email or there is some kind of error (or warning) it will just be launched into orbit. Never to be seen again. Shouldn't it go into the Badmail folder or something?