The Cloud & Sharepoint

Wow,

Realized recently that you can run Sharepoint on AWS (Amazon Web Services), Amazon Cloud Services, and also in your own and free cloud solution, OpenStack.

This can be very interesting news for someone looking for cutting back on costs... And OpenStack should grow for a finner product, since ebay and paypal have decided to move from VMware to OpenStack!!

If this is news to you, just check out amazon page, or this post about a SharePoint Eng. talking on how to setup a Windows Server on OpenStack. If you already knew about this please tell me what you think about it and if you have tried any of these services.

I'm still alive!

It's been a while since my last post, I just looked and it's from September 2011, wow, that's along time...

Hopefully that's going to change, let's see ;-)

For now, I just want to highlight this great service from the guys at CloudShare, I just found out that they are offering a trial of a full Sharepoint 2013 environment, with 3 machines, AD+SQL+MOSS2013. And also 2010 if you want a quick access to a 2010 server.

The remote access is done via java applet, it's a bit slow and weird but it does the job, and if you don't have access to a 2013 RTM ISO, this is a nice way to get to know the platform.

I found about CloudShare, by the great SP guru Andrew Connell, and Critical Path Training. The post is from March 2012 so this isn't fresh news, but the 2013 part should be 'kinda' fresh :)

I haven't seen this type of service, at least for free (even for this small amount of time, 14 days for 2010 and 2 days for 2013) anywhere, and if there are more around, please do share!

If you do not care for the 2010 trial, just go to CloudShare site and create a trial account and fire up Sharepoint 2013, have fun!

WSS User Info data not in sync with MOSS User Profile

If your WSS User Info data not in sync with MOSS User Profile and you have two or more frontends, please read on...

After trying everything on the books (http://blogs.technet.com/b/nishants/archive/2010/08/23/troubleshooting-user-profile-sync-issues-in-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx) I wasnt able to solve it, including with the stsadm commands:


stsadm -o sync -ignoreisactive 1
stsadm -o sync -deleteolddatabases 0
stsadm -o sync


Then, after browsing the ULS I found the following error:



User Profile Import: Error while querying for whether the import is in progress: 
    System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: 
        An unexpected error occurred on a send. ---> System.IO.IOException: Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream.

and a quick browse @ google this post appeared (http://mrvsharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/02/when-you-to-search-settings-you-get.html)

After that it was a question of replacing the SSL Certificates for the Office Server Web Services web site using selfssl from IIS 6.0 Resouces kit and the problem was solved.

Hope you find this information usefull.

Log Parser

Just found out about Log Parser 2.2 from Microsoft, and while I was at it, i grabbed Visual Log Parser from CodePlex for a nice GUI (who likes cl right?)

This is simple app that I found out while trying to understand by IIS was recycling too many times and browsing this post.

It looks like you can query your EventViewer and a ton of other Log repositories just like a regular SQL database:

Select top 100 *

from \\server\System where SourceName = 'W3SVC'

and EventID in (1009;1010;1011;1074;1077;1078;1079;1080;1117)

order by timegenerated desc

Better than scrolling up and down right? You can even build up some VBS or something else to have some real time data from your logging. And this will work for different log platforms.

Remote Log4Net

You probably know this already, or this might not come as a surprise but enabling log4net to log to a remote place is really simple.

We had a scenario of only one front end with custom systems using log4net, but we needed to add a second front end, and with that the question about what to do about logging.

I wasn't aware how simple is to enable remote logging on log4net. So, heads up if you were like me:

Get log4net Remove Logging Service at CodePlex (you can get the source and change at your will), after install this will create a listener service where you want to store your remote log repository.

Then, at your local clients just change the appender to something like this

<appender name="remotAppend" type="log4net.Appender.RemotingAppender" >

<sink value="tcp://remoteserver:port/Log4netRemotingServerService" />

<lossy value="false" />

<bufferSize value="10" />

<onlyFixPartialEventData value="true" />

</appender>

At your Remote repository use your favorite appender, RollingLogFileAppender or whatever.

Remember to add the hostname property to your layout type: (%-10property{log4net:HostName}).

Something like this:

<appender name="RollLogAppender" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender">

<file value="C:\LOGS\MYAPP.log.txt" />

<appendToFile value="true" />

<rollingStyle value="Date" />

<encoding value="UTF-8" />

<datePattern value="'.'yyyy'.'MM'.'dd'.'HH'.log.txt'" />

<lockingModel type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender+MinimalLock" />

<layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">

<conversionPattern value="%date (%-10property{log4net:HostName}) [%thread] %-5level %logger - %message%newline" />

</layout>

</appender>

Maybe you could do without this Codeplex service, but since it was so simple and the component is working fine I didnt waste any time looking for alternatives.

If you dont agree, please comment, shed some light :) Thank you.

Full documentation on:

http://log4netremotelogging.codeplex.com/

http://logging.apache.org/log4net/index.html

IE8 Life Saver Tip

If you usually access say SharePoint (or any other site) with several users at the same time, for testing, admin, regular user, etc., you may found that IE8 doesnt allow you since every Window will share only one credential. With IE7 everything worked fine, it seems its a new 'feature'.

Well, the solution is pretty simple, File -> New Session, or else you can add "-nomerge" in your local IE shortcut.

Everything on http://www.walkernews.net/2009/03/26/use-ie8-nomerge-option-to-login-multiple-accounts-of-same-site/

Files missing in SharePoint? Even from RecycleBin and (god forbids) AllUserData?

If files are disappearing from your SharePoint Document Library and you are (probably) using some custom code on SharePoint Doc Libs then check if you have any SPFile.Delete() call because if so, that row will disappear from SharePoint for ever...Unless you have you Backup/Restore working on.

Developers should be aware that there is another method, .Recycle() that will send the file to the RecycleBin, and this is safer in most cases. Of couse if RecycleBin is disabled this method doesn't add any value i guess...

There are other cases that will delete the file for ever like sp workflow deletions but im not aware of more...probably those that internally use Delete().

There are some nice posts with more info on this @ sharemypoint, and its also good to read the SPFile documentation ;)