Monday 20 October 2008

Error changing SMTP settings in IIS Manager after configuring incoming email in the farm

Came across one of those bizarre scenarios where you apply a hotfix to resolve an issue and it causes a separate issue.



After configuring incoming mail settings on a MOSS farm I started to get an unspecified SMTP error when I tried changing SMTP settings from within IIS Manager. Further investigation revealed that the issue was caused by my applying the hotfix (KB946517) to resolve Event ID 6398, 7076 and 6432 errors.



The problem is described in detail here on the MSDN blog http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2008/04/14/issue-smtp-configuration-unspecified-error.aspx



and the subsequent Microsoft Knowledgebase article is here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/KB/950426



A hotfix is now available from Microsoft which resolves this issue.





Sunday 12 October 2008

Clicking on a user clickable link does not redirect to the Person.aspx page but stays on the Userdisp.aspx page instead

I came across this problem recently where clicking on a user's clickable link, for example in the column "Modified By" took you to the userdisp.aspx page but instead of redirecting you to your MOSS profile page (person.aspx) which should happen if you are using MOSS as opposed to WSS 3.0 you are left at the userdisp.aspx page.

There are a number of thoughts on why this happens and each of these are published around the web ranging from the redirect getting confused by AAM settings to a bug where your portal FQDN and your MySites FQDN do not share the same root URL (e.g http://intranet/ and http://mysite/). I have tested this and found this problem does not occur if for example you have the following URL's http://intranet/ and http://intranet:8088/ being the MySite URL. This would seem to support the "Same Root URL" theory.



They way this was resolved by myself and my colleague Ajay Chauhan (http://sharepointetcetera.blogspot.com/) who was working on this particular project with me was to set up a Portal Site Connection on the Site Collection(s) that have this problem and the MySite host. Now this isn't ideal but we specified the name of the connection as a full stop to make it as inconspicuous as possible to users (as shown below). This full stop does appear in the breadcrumb trail on the top left hand of pages though.













Update:

Looking around I believe this may be resolved in SP2.

More details can be found in this blog by Larry Kuhn http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/LKuhn/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=47

Monday 22 September 2008

How to get a link to go back to the parent site after you have deleted a site

Probably not that vital in the scheme of things but annoying enough that someone will ask for it.

Problem: When you delete a site you don’t get a link to go back to the parent site (in fact no links at all)

Solution: http://sharepointsherpa.com/2008/04/08/sharepoint-2007-back-link-after-deleting-a-site

Thursday 3 July 2008

Backup Exec not backing up Web Apps with Parentheses

A little while back I came upon an issue where a customer was using the Backup Exec agent for SharePoint 2007 and experiencing an error message when adding a MOSS farm to the backup selection. The error message you receive is:

An error was encountered while attempting to browse the contents of SiteName (xx)\Content-DB 1 (SQLServerName\SQLInstanceName\DatabaseName). A network connection to the server could not be established.


The error occurs if you use Parentheses () in your web application names. Further details are provided in the following article: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/294620.htm

In other words if you have a Web Application called “SharePoint (MySite)” and one called “SharePoint (Portal)”. Backup exec will not back this up.

Symantec claim this issue is fixed with the release of version 12.5 of Backup Exec.

Wednesday 2 July 2008

Interesting points from the SDPS Deployment and Customisation Plan

Just been reading through the SDPS Deployment and Customisation Plan and picked up on the following stuff. Just wondered how many people are doing this already? I always make the SSP service and SSP App Pool identity separate accounts and was not aware of disabling NetBios over TCP/IP on WFE’s and Index Servers.

  • SSP App Pool Identity and Service account recommended to be the same account

  • NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT ) support should be disabled on all network cards on the Web Front End and Index servers.
  • Avoid more than eight Application Pools per farm

Wednesday 9 April 2008

Going into Page Settings from Page Editing Toolbar on a restored site collection using Collaboration Portal template gives "Unexpected Error"

I backed up a site collection which used the Collaboration Portal and then restored it over a new site collection using stsadm -o restore and the -overwrite switch. I then found that going into page settings from the Page Editing Toolbar on the portal home page gave an "unexpected error". After searching the web I found that this is caused by the Page Layout URL not being correct or somehow becoming unnattached for the page. The page will load but Page Settings will give an error.

The fix I implemented was using one of Gary Lapointes enhanced STSADM Extensions command http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/08/stsadm-commands_09.html:

stsadm -o fixpublishingpagespagelayouturl

"Page has been modified by another user" error when sites have been moved between site collections

If you move sites by using stsadm -o export or backup a site collection and restore it over another site collection you may find that editing the quick launch navigation within team sites will give you the following error: "The page has been modified by another author