Stacy Draper

Finding Every Server That Has SharePoint Installed

Stacy Draper — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:35:33 GMT

For whatever reason SharePoint teams sites tend to popup all over the network. Somehow marketing gets a server. Marketing then installs SharePoint on it themselves. Marketing becomes dependent on the data SharePoint houses. This usually underpowered and fault intolerant server crashes and burns. The data is lost. Orgnaization suffers.

This is just one senerio, but there are many reasons why you don’t want SharePoint weeds in your network. Licensing. The “What did you know and when did you know it factor” to name a few. @buckleyPlanet posted a microblog on twitter.

“Are there any community/3rd party replacements for the #SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool?” was the entire post that started me thinking about all that. At the time I had totally forgotten about this tool. Apparently it’s gone. I don’t know why, but the links I got to give me a 403. It could be misplaced or removed without notice. So I got to thinking about replacements for this thing.

All it did was tell you what servers were running SharePoint and how many sites and site collections there were on each server that it found. At least that’s what I think it did. Anyways my mind flooded with alternatives and started searching the web for more. THere are a few ways to do this, the one I actually tried out was using PowerShell. It took me about an hour to write:

$objSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher
$objSearcher.Filter = '(OperatingSystem=Window*Server*)'
"Name","canonicalname","distinguishedname" | Foreach-Object {$null = $objSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add($_) }
$names = $objSearcher.FindAll() | Select-Object @{n='Name';e={$_.properties['name']}},@{n='ParentOU';e={$_.properties['distinguishedname'] -replace '^[^,]+,'}},@{n='CanonicalName';e={$_.properties['canonicalname']}},@{n='DN';e={$_.properties['distinguishedname']}}
$names | forEach-object{$_.name + "`n" + "=================="; get-wmiobject -computerName $_.name -class win32_product | where {$_.Name -eq "Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 "}; "`n"; "`n"}

I say I wrote it. I copy and pasted my way to it. the first part I ripped off from http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/eu/ITCG/thread/9d501454-2f51-43b5-8bea-303a1c9f2094 The second part I had from something I was doing earlier in the week.

This script isn’t awesome it just is.

Experiences with my SharePoint development farm

Stacy Draper — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:00:48 GMT

So I’ve been building out a new development farm and trying a few things out on it here and there. I’ve experimented with the dynamic ram in Hyper-v. The database server got so messed up he didn’t even know he was running sql. I set it back to a static amount, rebooted and all was right with the world. I had two web front ends and the surprise there was both web front ends have to be up if you want the .wsp solution to install correctly. I spent all my time today getting bginfo set up just the way I wanted it. I guess the first thing to do is describe my environment.

First off I had to make a choice between Hyper-V and VMware. At the time I built the host my client was mostly using Hyper-V, or so I was told. It turned out later that they were really using more VMWare. The other deciding factor was that it came with my OS. There are converts to go from VMWare to Hyper-V and vice versa, never the same tool though. But they do exist and they aren’t terrible. Long story short I went with Hyper-V.

I have AD1 (Active Directory) and it’s still on a dynamic allocation of ram 768MB – 1792MB right now it’s at 953MB assigned and it’s using 686MB. I only have one user. Me. If I ever have a situation where I’m testing users I’ll but it up to 2 or 4GB.

The DB1 (Database) has been set to a static 4096MB. Before the incident it was set dynamically at 2G – 4G and it was assigned 3.5G and using 3G.

WFE1 (Web Front End) is set to use 4 processors and 8 gigs of ram. I was messing around with the processors giving 2 here and 4 there. Turns out I was over thinking it. They are virtual processors and I can only assign up to 4. Having 12 available it just didn’t make sense. I couldn’t say physically which processor it should use or shouldn’t use. So what the heck? I gave everyone 4 processors. 8 gigs of ram because there’s visual studio and everything else under the sun on that box. That’s where I spend a lot of my time so I want it to run real smooth.

WFE2 is still on the dynamic ram technology with 2-8GB it runs around 2GB assigned and 512MB used. The reason why I went with 2 WFEs is so that I could do a little bit more testing before my code leaves me. I never really felt like I was missing out on anything before, but I have it there just in case. I used to have it connected all the time, but then I learned that when it’s not booted up the wsp never deploys. Not wanting to have that kind of problem on my development box I took it out of the farm with PSConfig. I’ll put it back in with PSConfigif I ever need it.

An interesting thing about this PSConfigis that WFE2 hosted central admin as well as WFE1. I removed WFE2 through central admin and added WFE2 back to the farm with PSConfig and I told it not to host central admin. This caused a problem to appear. I was getting messages about not upgrading properly. So I removed wfe2 through PSConfig this time and added it back to the farm telling WFE2 to host central admin again. Then I removed it with PSConfig and added it back telling it NOT to host central admin. That finally worked. I guess I wanted my way? Maybe I didn’t want to forget that I had it hosting central admin? Who knows all that matters is it’s the way I want it and I’m happy.

Fabian Williams convinced me to have a client machine. I don’t know if I’ll ever use this one but we’ll see. As a matter of fact I just looked and seemed to have messed it up. I created an iSCSI drive and I disconnected it, but it was a windows 7 box with the recommended ram and probably 4 processors.

I’ve spent the last few days trying to find a project that I could do for community. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t done a few different ways so I went on a detour today. I thought hey, I’m like a real live sysadmin now. Now I too can have those cool desktops with the text on it that tells me all about the server I’m on like in Figure 1.

So I hopped on Google and didn’t know what to search for. So I hopped on twitter and blurted out something like, “What do admins use to write on the backgrounds of their desktops?” As always Todd Klindt made sense of my question and suggested that some people like to use BGInfo. Several people agreed, except Mark Rackley. He some how came up with Sharpie, but I wanted something more dynamic than that.

BGInfo is pretty cool and time tested so I’m not going to get into all of it’s awesomeness. I saw that I could get values via vbscript. I thought that should be fun. I was once the best I knew at vbscript and was wondering if I still had the touch. Turns out I don’t. I spent all day today trying to figure out how to call PowerShell from VBScript. You can do it, but you’re not going to be calling SharePoint cmdlets. those are 64 bit. VBScript, as I became painfully reaware of is 32 bit. There are a couple reasons why this wouldn’t have worked. The Calling application that creates the app domain in the first place is 32bit.

However I did come up with some good ideas. To use VBScript to call PowerShell and then pass data back to VBScript I came up with a few things that worked and a few that don’t. So you’ll see some stuff about environment variables. That doesn’t work because environment variables are session specific and I couldn’t find anything that would let you rewrite the system environment variables. So that was out. What I finally liked was writing to a file cause that’s super easy in PowerShell and reading in VBScript and that’s only about 5 lines of code that you can copy and paste. Passing information to PowerShell by parameters worked pretty well too.

So I was really stuck. How was I going to get the SharePoint Version. I rarely use it. But I wanted it. I had to have it on the desktop. I don’t know why either, but just bare with me. I was going to use PowerShell to get the version number. Cause again I blurted out a question like, “How can I get the version number from SharePoint” in twitter. @usher and @toddklindt responded with get-spfarm | select BuildVersion or something similar. Both they’re approaches were a little different but were basically the same idea. This other guy, @sstrnager, came up with something around get-wmiobject win32_product and this got me to thinking. Since BGInfo has a built in WMI query interface maybe I can just use that? I was right. for the first time today. It felt pretty good. Until I spent 2 hours trying to get a scheduled task to work which started working for no reason at all. I finally used

SELECT Version FROM Win32_Product WHERE name = "Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 "

So at the end of a very long day I was able to put some text on a desktop or 4 and leave my self some notes. I do wish I could centrally manage this. I dread having to go to each machine to do make a little change. Like leave myself another little note about my farm or if there’s other information I would like to see is going to be a major chore. Maybe I can but the configuration file on a network drive? I’ve never had much luck with that and I’ve had enough rejection for one day.

Cheap office 365 pricing

Stacy Draper — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:33:07 GMT

Alls you gotta do is . . . .

Become a registered partner or higher, then from there join online services as a competency and then cloud services and you get office 365 free for a year and then it's half price after that if you don't meet the sales quota.

When certificates have fallen and can’t get up.

Stacy Draper — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 11:49:02 GMT

When upgrading to windows server 2008 R2 from sans R2 the Security Token Service loses its self-generated certificates and an error “The requested service, 'http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc' could not be activated.” The resolution is simple enough. Re-Provision the Token Service. This seems like a popular way to fix a lot of things in SharePoint 2010. Something’s broken? Recreate the service application. Jon in support was awesome he gave me a nice little PowerShell script.

$sts = Get-SPServiceApplication | where {$_.name -like "*token*"}
$sts.provision()

All this does is find service application with the name token in it and then it provisions it. Simple enough but took forever to figure out.

Slow People Picker

Stacy Draper — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 12:49:31 GMT

So maybe you have a slow people picker? We did. The network guy said “Let’s check which ports are being blocked.” I thought “well, it’s working so I don’t know what good that’s going to do? It’s just super slow.” but I bit my tongue and went through the motions.

We saw that port 3268 was being blocked from SharePoint servers to AD. We unblocked it and the people picker ran like the wind. I was amazed. Now that we new the port number things became easier to find. First thing I did was tweet about it. Then we went and did some research.

Our infrastructure was a little weird, they are . . . let’s say, firewall friendly. Between the 3 servers in the SharePoint farm there are 3 firewalls and then between all that and AD there’s one going out and one before active directory. The outbound firewall rule was prohibiting 3268 from going out.

Last night I had an interview and it came up and I couldn’t hardly remember the port, so I thought I’d blog about it. An hour ago I sat down to write this post and couldn’t find my tweet. I never know how hard it was to find old tweets. Good thing for me I have cool friends who know stuff. Dan Usher send me this link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832017 and I saw the port number and it jogged my memory.

The long and the short of it is ldap at 389 is not as graceful as the catalog at 3268 at searching. If you have a slow people picker try to find someone while looking at the traffic and you’ll see a wealth of information.

Google Wave RIP

Stacy Draper — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:35:07 GMT

So Google officially came out and killed Wave. Here is yet another technology that I've learned that has one away. They claimed adoption, frankly I was waiting for it's release! I was planning on speaking about it at the SPEVO conference in London, but I got volcanoed out but I was going to switch topics anyways.

Some of the problems stem from the browser war. Chrome loosely interpreted an HTML tag while IE strictly interpreted it. This meant that worked in chrome and not IE. So that kind of killed the whole Google wave to SharePoint integration. Another thing that got worse was they playback. It sometimes got out sequence and didn't playback character for character like they promised. In the beginning it was great because it was different by providing the user with the context of time. Towards the end it was just another forum or discussion board.

It's really too bad that technology didn't make it. I think if someone were to deploy what Google had advertised I think would have been a great success.

Functions Used In Calculated Columns In SharePoint Lists

Stacy Draper — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:52:43 GMT

A question that I've had on the back burner for quite some time is what are the functions in SharePoint calculated columns. I've taken a cursoury look here and there and never found the answer. I've recently been passing direct messages via twitter to AndrewClark, @sharepointac, and he sent me a message that had the answer I've been looking for http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/CH011711171033.aspx

Working with existing SharePoint views from code

Stacy Draper — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:32:27 GMT

Every week I have to fax a form that has data that I keep in a log, a SharePoint list actually. The recipient expects it to be done by hand, I guess there aren’t many people who go the extra step and make a SharePoint list. I was just hoping to export the information to an excel spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet confused them. They just wanted to see their little for filled out by hand. I don’t like to do anything by hand.

Using GDI+ to load up the form as a bitmap then using the Graphics object to draw text in a comic font, kind of looks like I wrote it by hand. I had even considered (and still considering) buying our own fonts, for each person who enters information into the log, from a place like www.yourfont.com. By checking the “last modified by” to see whose font to use. I decided against it because they are 9 bucks a piece and I figured no one would ever notice and there’s certainly no value in it other than it’s “cool”. Once the image is created it’s sent as an email attachment to www.fax1.com and they fax it where it needs to go. Seems simple enough. I figured it would take a few hours, but I ran into a couple problems around using an existing view on a list.

There is a time and a place to use a SPView vs an SPQuery. The problem is that people can change the SPView and that could be exactly what you want. But most of the time you want to use an SPQuery in your code. I was in a hurry and didn’t feel like writing a CAML query and it bit me right in the butt a couple of times.

First problem I ran into was "Value does not fall within the expected range" which means the column isn’t in the result set that I was bringing back. So I went to the view and added the column, but not so fast! I first assumed that the column was there already and spent some time searching for a solution and trying a few variations on the code. This hacking led me down a road where I thought something was seriously wrong. I could do something like items[i].Fields[“my-Field”].InternalName and it would give me my_x002d_Field, or whatever the hex for a hyphen is. Then I would pass the internal name to the items collection like this items[items[i].Fields[“my-Field”].InternalName] and I still got the error! The point being I got all wound up in the wrong direction for two reasons:

The fields collection doesn’t have anything to do with the fields that are brought back in the view.
The hyphen wasn’t as near much trouble as I was trying to make it.

The field names don’t change no matter what the user does, but they can delete a field. A missing field can cause your code problems, so you need to check for the field first just so your code doesn’t bomb. Using a view can be nice because a user change change the sort order or even the order of fields. They can also mess with the group by which leads me to the second problem.

The other problem I ran into was a very vague message "An entry with the same key already exists" around Collections.Specialized was mentioned. I’m not making a collection, I’m being handed one! I was just simply pulling back a collection and I was getting this error messages. I tried it as an SPItemsCollection, I tried it as a DataTable, I tried it in the morning and I tried it at night. I was even looking around for a virgin goat to sacrifice. Then it dawned on me that the duplicate key that it could be talking about is the group by on the DateTime column. I removed the group by and everything worked as designed. I loaded up the ChartPart and pointed to a view that had a groupby on it as well. Groupbys are nice for people and I think a very common thing. But unless you’ve written your code to accommodate them know that you’ll have problems.

For the most part an SPQuery is the way to go, but when I’m in a hurry, being cheap, or just want to prove a point I’ll use a SPView and manage it on the list. I can imagine where a SPView would be very useful when the business needs the user to manage the query, but if that’s not the case then SPQueries are the way to go.

Audio stops working in Windows Server 2008

Stacy Draper — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:03:02 GMT

My workstation operating system (OS) is Windows Server 2008, for a number of reasons, but mostly so I can better describe what settings need to be set where. Everyone once in a while my audio has quite working. Actually on any server os my audio quits a lot. It usually comes back when I reboot but I don’t reboot but every 15 to 30 days. I have a bazillion things open and rebooting is always a pain in the butt.

Start > Administrative Tools > Services > Restart “Windows Audio”

or if it happens enough make a batch file:

net stop "Windows Audio"
net start "Windows Audio"

Ferrari Case Study

Stacy Draper — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:46:50 GMT

I just read the Ferrari case study and was surprised by this statement, “Site traffic has increased by 237 percent, with a 150 percent increase in unique visitors.” SharePoint by itself doesn’t increase traffic. Understanding how search engines look at your site and being able to manage the content search engines look at increases traffic.

The article did state that it’s now easier manage content than it was in their previous java based version. It almost sounded like they had to have a developer make all content changes. I’m not a Java fan, but I do think this is a cheap shot at a whole platform. There are plenty of bad content management solutions in .NET technologies too. The increased traffic was a combination of a few things.

When the content, meta tags, titles and other asset areas are easy to manage it’s easier to make the search engines like the site. It’s also important to know what they like. So it’s important to know what to do and to have the ability to do it, and this is what a properly implemented SharePoint brings to the table. Believe me you can set up SharePoint so that it doesn’t cater to search engines at all. It’s just content, like anything else it can be managed poorly or it can be managed well.

These numbers do seem modest so I tend to believe they aren’t from a marketing champagne (because even a bad one would more than double your traffic) and are really from search engine optimization but it’s hard to know that for sure.

The bottom line is that the case study didn’t clearly point out why traffic increased. I think they are trying to say that because the content was more easily managed they were better able to optimize the content for higher ranks on the search engines.

I may pick and choose who I work with but at least I’m not asking the government for money

Stacy Draper — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:27:13 GMT

Here’s a page out of my Sunday morning. I went to Chrysler. I heard that they had some pretty good deals so I thought I’d go find out more about it. Having crappy luck online and being in the area to big one that didn’t close down recently I thought I’d just drop in. Just on a whim and maybe walk out with a car. I just need adaptive cruise control and a few other things and I’d be set. Walking into the dealership I saw this sweet little Dodge Challenger and it looked cool.

Upon entering the Arrigo dealership I found there were 4 sales people and a receptionist. One of the sales people greeted me and asked me how I was doing and if he could help me. I said, “Sure, I’ve heard you got some great deals and I’d like to know more about your product line.” He pushes me off with a back handed wave onto the other sales people behind him.

Another one in the bunch notices that I’m flailing and he asks me if he can help me. So I tell him the same but this time I don’t say what I want as smoothly, in looking back on it it’s because now I’m a little bugged and the Challenger is now where in my mind. I’m wondering to myself why I’m even here. Then this person comes up in between us and tries to be cute, but she’s not, and asks me if she can help me.

Noticing that she was obviously the receptionist I said, “Look please don’t ask me if you can help me if you really can’t?” I’m there to buy a car, it’s not that big of a jump in logic. She nods her head like she’ll be able to help me so I tell my story a third time. She responds with, “Can I get some information?”

“No.” she obviously wasn’t just wanting my name. I’m certain she wanted my address, email, and phone number. I just want to learn about Chrysler. She stood there looking at me with her shoulders shrugged as if to say, “If you don’t give me any information I can’t sell you car.” But before she could even come up with any nonsense like that I turned and started to walk out and it struck me as I was walking to the door and I turned and said “I may pick and choose who I work with, but at least I’m not asking the government for money.”

First wave page

Stacy Draper — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:23:18 GMT

After receiving notice that I was accepted into the program I get my user name and password in less than 30 minutes. I get logged in and it was confusing at first because it’s a whole new interface and paradigm. Like chat and forums all mixed into one. Like forums with the extra ability to reply right in the middle of someone else's sentence.

The first thing I wanted to do was build extract a wave to my own web page. I did that at http://www.wildwires.com/wave/demo1.aspx it’s my wave attempting to recruit other developers to help build a bunch of controls around wave.

I was trying to figure out how to keep the screen shot in sync like take one every 5 minutes for example, but I couldn’t figure out an easy way to do that.

So far there are three of us and 2 features, create new wave and rss feed. Once I get it done I’ll stick it in a web part this will probably be a codeplex project and I’ll post the url to it once we get it going.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Available in MSDN August 6th

Stacy Draper — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:00:29 GMT

Twitter is pretty awesome. I couldn’t figure out when windows 7 was going to be in MSDN. Post a question and get a response, “krichie@stacyDraper August 6th http://bit.ly/OFsrN”.

Other times twitter can be a pain with all the “Look at me” posts, this time it worked out pretty good.

Thanks Keith,

Stacy

An invitation to Google Wave Developer Sandbox

Stacy Draper — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:45:38 GMT

So I just got an email about Google wave. Basically it was a URL sending me to a Google docs form where I entered what I would like my user name to be and stuff like that. It says in a few days that I should get some additional information.

I guess Telligent is not free for community any more

Stacy Draper — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:09:16 GMT

After some careful deliberation I decided to put www.sfspug.com on Telligent’s community server. I knew they were coming out with a new version soon and I thought it would be good because then I could see the older version and migrate to the newer one. What I hadn’t counted on was that they wouldn’t have a new community server community edition. Well I went to the site and I couldn’t find it. So I went to the Tellignet’s contact page and I indicated that I couldn’t find the free version like I had before. Below is the email dialog where they answered and said they don’t have a free version. I asked them how much it is and they didn’t respond at all. My feeling is when you ask, “How much is it” and they can’t answer that in a short simple sentence then there’s a problem:

How much is it?

From: Grant Pankonien [mailto:GPankonien@telligent.com]
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 12:51 PM
To: Stacy Draper
Subject: Telligent can help solve your business challenges with Web 2.0

Dear Stacy,

Thank you for your request sent into our sales team. Unfortunately, we no longer offer a free version of our software.

The only option we have at this point is an Enterprise class license.

Please let me know if I can do anything for you or can help in any way.

Thank you, Stacy!

Thanks,

Grant Pankonien

Inside Sales, Telligent

GPankonien@telligent.com

o: 214.420.9939 | f: 972.407.0194 | m: 512.913.2682 telligent.com

17950 Preston Rd., Suite 310, Dallas, Texas 75252 | Toll-free: 1 (877) 492-9484

I still haven’t received an answer and the price isn’t listed on their website. They clearly have something called community – I don’t know what that is now that Grant has indicated there’s only enterprise. Just how hard does one have to beg to buy something?