Tech Tied

Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2

clarktechie — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:39:24 +0000

For sometime now the company I work for has been using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. It has it’s problems but as a whole it’s a very powerful application. We just recently installed Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2, it hasn’t disappointed us. The Machine Manager is a program that you install on individual machines. It is different from Virtual PC 2007 as it is like Virtual Server it shows the VM status (running, stopped etc). It is very user friendly, unlike Virtual Server which was not straight forward and very finicky.

The main motivator for why we moved from Virtual Server 2005 to Virtual Machine Manager 2007 was for its save points feature. Yes Virtual Server has save points I do realize, but with Machine Manager you can save multiple points and label them. When you want to go back in time you can choose a past point and go back as far as you need (reminds me of restore points in Windows XP).

Another major change in Machine Manager is the way that it makes disks and stores them. No more differencing disks! I hate differencing disks. My dislike for them was spawned from my inability to re-organize disk because of there reliance to there parent disk. With a differencing disk if the parent disk becomes corrupt or is deleted or moved all of the child disks will no longer function. The new Machine Manager makes a full copy of the parent disk and then stores both the disk and the machines config file in it’s own independent folder. You can move the folder anywhere you like and it will still work like it always has.

I highly recommend Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager 2007. It is still in beta but in a whole it hasn’t been too buggy. Here is the link to download the Beta 2 Evaluation version. I don’t know how much the full version will be when it is released but you can try it out for now. Tell me what your opinion of the program is, leave me a comment.

-Kevin

Sharepoint 2003 External Connector License

clarktechie — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:37:55 +0000

We found our answer to our Sharepoint License issue. Stay with Sharepoint 2003 version, much cheaper! We got a quote for the Sharepoint 2007 External Connector License for about $30,000. Compare this to the 2003 license for $2,000! Since we don’t need any of the new features that MOSS offers we will happily stay with the cheap alternative. Here is a quote from a repable site about the license.

“External Connector License. An External Connector License allows an unlimited number of authenticated external users to access a server. If the number of user accounts will approach or exceed 20, the External Connector License is the most economic choice. Although there may not be 20 external users when the solution is initially implemented, consider planned usage of the technology over time before selecting the licensing type for your organization. The estimated retail price of the External Connector License is $1,999.”

-Kevin

Keep your Report Server in Native Mode!

clarktechie — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:09:14 +0000

Do not use the Report Server add-in for SharePoint. There is no need to use it, it has only given me a headache. All you need to do when you are running the Reporting Services Configuration Tool is to add the Reports and ReportServer Virtual Directories to the SharePoint site. I know, this seems too simple right, well it works. Please keep in mind that i am using SSL and i have not tried this otherwise. When I first started research this I came across the Reporting Services Add-In for SharePoint tutorial from here. It says to setup the Report Server on the default web site in IIS under a different port. Well this didn’t work for me so I read up and others told me to create a new sub site named something like reports. So I made reports.ourwebsite.com and SharePoint was on portal.ourwebsite.com. So now I install the add-in and I think everything is good. Then we moved our web server to a different box that was not a domain controller. Well this made problems because we had the site setup for windows authentication. While on the domain controller the website only asked for the username and password, now that IIS is on a separate box it asks for the domain\username and password. That won’t work because our customers will not know the domain name. So I moved us to Basic Authentication. The issue with this is the Report Server Add-In for SharePoint will not work with Basic Authentication. Now I am stuck having to put the Report Server back to Native mode and have our customers click a link from our portal to reports. The issue now is our customers now need to double authenticate, first to portal then to reports! Then I was recommended from a co-worker to try and just add the Report Server application pools to the SharePoint site. So I tried it even though all the documentation I’ve read seemed to completely veer away from that idea. It worked!! I added my link in the page viewer web part and it is flawless. I am able to use basic authentication and have the report integrated into my SharePoint webpage. I am kind of upset because the Microsoft website steered me on the wrong path. Anyway it all worked so I’m happy. If you look a couple of posts down you will see a picture of the integrated Report Server in SharePoint, my new setup looks exactly the same as this. If you have any questions at all please leave me a comment and I will defiantly try and help.

-Kevin

SharePoint CAL’s (Client Access License)

clarktechie — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:26:56 +0000

I now know how Microsoft makes there money. We just upgraded to SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) and we are about to make our site public to our customers. We found that we needed to buy licences to allow our customers use SharePoint. You can reference this Microsoft page for more information about this: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101655351033.aspx.

We found that it will cost about $90 for a standard use of SharePoint and about $70 extra to use the Enterprise Edition (new features from MOSS). That is about $160 per customer! There is one more option which is called an Internet Licence. This allows anyone to use your site, no separate CAL’s required. Sounds too good to be true? It costs $40,000! We have about 40 customers so I don’t think that it would be worth that. I love SharePoint but I am starting to see why open source got popular.

-Kevin

Reporting Service add-in for Sharepoint 3.0 & MOSS 2007

clarktechie — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 07:48:58 +0000

I’ve had a couple requests to see how the reporting service add-in for SharePoint looks like on my site. My purpose of merging the two is to allow our customers to view there current and past bug reports they had submitted to our company. I built a report to show the status of there ticket and all the notes that have been recorded on the ticket. The database that the report is quarrying is SQL and the bug tracking system we are using is TestTrack Pro. We had to convert the TestTrack Pro database to SQL from its Native database to allow for reporting. The reporting service add-in allows you to upload a report to any document library. The permissions for that report are managed by whatever permissions you define in SharePoint. Please note that the user must have sufficient permissions in the SQL database you are quarrying to allow for report viewing. The add-in also comes with a report web part which allows you to define perimeters. In my case i used the company name to allow the one report with all of our customers to be narrowed down to the specific company for report viewing on there site specific web page. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

-Kevin

Delete Orphaned Sites in SharePoint

clarktechie — Thu, 31 May 2007 23:00:58 +0000

So I ran into an issue the other day with deleting a SharePoint site. I needed to delete a site and re-create it because of our migration. To do this I went to Site Setting on the specific site and deleted it from the web browser. I have done this before with this site because I needed to practice the migration, no issues before. This time although the server was moving slow, and because of this it just continued to try and delete the site with no confirmation page that it was successful. The page was gone so I thought all was well. This was until I saw errors coming from the server logs relating to the page I had deleted! I looked in the Central Administration page to check the site list, the site was still there! I clicked to delete the site from the Central Administration page but it would not work, no option to delete. I then tried to delete the site with STSADM.EXE but I got this error with both stsadm.exe -o deletesite and stsadm.exe -o deleteweb: The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070003). I searched this error on the internet and found a solution which did finally work.

Go here for the Microsoft solution: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;918744

I did the following.

Step 1: I opened a Command Prompt and went to this directory: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

I typed in the following to list the orphaned sites:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName

I then typed the following to delete the orphaned sites:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName -deletecorruption

This didn’t harm anything but didn’t seem to do anything either. Since I did preform this step I cannot say it didn’t help and I can’t say it did, so i would do it just in case.

Step 2: This was the final step that did fix the issue. Remove and then reattach the content databases on the virtual server. I am quoting this from Microsoft:

1. Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.

2. Under Virtual Server Configuration on the Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration page, click Configure virtual server settings.

3. Click the virtual server that you want to configure, and then click Manage content databases under Virtual Server Management on the Virtual Server Settings page.

4. On the Manage Content Databases page, click the content database that you want to remove.

5. On the Manage Content Database Settings page, note the following settings:
• The database server
• The database name
• The database capacity settings

6. Click to select the Remove content database check box, and then click OK. When you are prompted to confirm that you want to remove the content database, click OK.

7. Click OK.

8. On the Manage Content Databases page, click Add a content database.

9. On the Add a Content Database page, specify the database server, the database name, and the database capacity settings. Then, click OK.

I hope this helps. It worked for me. The sites were gone completely and I was able to create the new site with the old name.

-Kevin

Report Server Error using SSL

clarktechie — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:09:07 +0000

I installed reporting services on a website when it was not setup with SSL to start. We had the security certificate so I setup report services for SSL but once I did this report manager stopped working. The error i received was this: The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized. I could still hit report server and view reports but i could not reach reports (Report Manager). After some research I found a Microsoft fix. It will require adding an entry into the registry. Well worth the time. It will not hurt anything (not that i know of anyway) to add the value. Once added I was able to get to the report manager on SSL.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;896861

This is the method that fixed my issue.

Follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer or just restart IIS

-Kevin

Sharepoint 3.0 Anonymous Access Bug

clarktechie — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:06:39 +0000

I’ve been working with Sharepoint for about 3 months now.I was playing with the idea of using the Bug Tracking Template from the Microsoft’s webpage as our bug tracking database here at work.Currently we are using Testtrack Pro as our ticketing system, but it would be nice to have one less thing to support.I know that Sharepoint is very powerful, and I do enjoy the ease of use.The problem that I have with Sharepoint is that it is easily customizable to a point, and then is very difficult.I got my test system the way that I like it then I went to set up an external page for bug tracking submissions.To do this I needed to enable anonymous access to lists and libraries on the bug tracking site.I did this and everything seemed to work fine, until I tried to attach a file.In the bug submission form it shows the place to attach a file and it does work if you have write access to the site, but this will not work for anonymous access.I thought that the answer must be to allow full control instead of just to lists and libraries, nope that didn’t work either!At this point I think to myself this has to be an easy fix, I will just need to edit the anonymous access permissions, right?Well after days of research on the topic if find there is no way to edit the permissions on anonymous access for Sharepoint 3.0.There may have been a tweak in 2.0 but not that I could find for 3.0.I am pissed!I needed this feature to work.I am only hoping that Microsoft will come out with a fix for this in the feature.Until then we are stuck with Testtracks pro.

-Kevin

Migrating Sharepoint Sites Using Stsadm.exe

clarktechie — Mon, 07 May 2007 15:55:40 +0000

My experience with Stsadm.exe is migrating Sharepoint 3.0 sites from one server to another. We were using Sharepoint 3.0 on a test server and we setup Sharepoint 3.0 and MOSS 2007 on another server. We needed to migrate existing data onto the new server.

**Very important. You need to be a farm administrator on both servers to have the specific permissions to complete the migration. If you are unsure do the migration while logged into the Administrator account. In my case i thought i had the right permissions but i didn’t. Stsadm.exe didn’t prompt why it couldn’t complete the migration, it just failed.

STSADM.EXE is already on your server located here:
%PROGRAMFILES%\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin.

Login to the server that had the files that you need to copy
Create a directory on your hard drive named “spbackup” on a drive that has enough storage space for the backup files.
Go to the startmenu, clicking RUN, then type in CMD.
In the command prompt window opens type “cd \” to bring you to the root of C:
Type in the following “cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN”
This next command will start the backup of your sites, so be prepaired it may take a few minites depending on the size of our site.

Type the following in the command prompt:

stsadm.exe -o export -url http://(Your Site) -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename d:\spbackup

Please Note:

I put in the command -nofilecompression becuase when i used file compression the backup failed, using this switch completed the backup with no errors.
Use HTTP or HTTPS depending on your setup
Replace the drive letter for where ever you created spbackup

Now hopefully the backup finished successfully. Your next step will be moving the spbackup folder onto the new server.

After you have moved the spbackup folder onto the new server login to the new server and repeat steps 3-6. Then when you are ready type in the following command to import the sites onto the new Sharepoint site.

stsadm.exe -o import -url https://(Your Site) -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename d:\spbackup

I hope that that your import completed successfully. If you have any questions please leave a comment on this post and I will do my best to help.

- Kevin C -

- Update 6-13-07 -

I forgot an important factor while you are migrating your SharePoint Sites. You may receive an error about something like “Missing WebTemplate” or something of that nature. If you do the reason for this is because you had added an Application Template on your site and it does not exist on the new site you are trying to migrate to. This is a simple error to fix. All you need to do is add the Application Template to the new site and then try to do the migration again. Please refer to the following link to the Microsoft page explaining how to import templates onto your SharePoint site. Click Here

-Kevin

Installing SQL Reporting Services

clarktechie — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:29:57 +0000

My latest project that i will be working on is to be installing and configuring SQL Reporting Services 2005 Standard Edition. I will then be making reports with already created SQL database files. It has so far taken me a week to install and configure reporting services. I originally started with trying to get reporting services to work with Sharepoint (we have Sharepoint 3.0 and MOSS 2005 installed on our 2003 Server). After deciding to try and use a database in Native mode instead of Integrated with Sharepoint I found that reporting services it self was messed up it was nothing to do with Sharepoint. Basically when i went to the reports section (http://(server-name)/reports) it would give me an error. The strange thing was that the reportserver section (http://(server-name)/reportserver) did seem to work. I uninstalled reporting services by going to “Add and Remove programs” and clicking “Change” on “SQL Server 2005.” I then picked the instance of SQL i was using and clicked “Next.” I then had the option to choose to uninstall “Reporting Services.”

When re-installing Reporting Services the “default” install instance was grayed out with “details” as an option to see why. The details said “The prerequisite check failed for a default report server installation: First time install, the SQL instance is either not selected or is not a local install.” I continued with the install and it finished successfully. I then went to Windows Updates and found that the SQL SP2 was needing to be downloaded and installed. This seemed odd to me since I had already installed SQL SP2 a week before hand. I guess since i installed Reporting Services and it had not been patched with SQL SP2 it needed to be updated (I had thought there would be a patch I wouldn’t have thought that i needed to install the whole thing again). After installing the SQL SP2 I attempted to run SQL Reporting Service Configuration Tool since there was no report from Microsoft that i needed to reboot. I got a really nasty error. So now I am thinking the program is corrupt, AGAIN! Ok so I guess I will restart the server and see if it helps or I may just need to try again (this sucks since this is a production machine and I have to send out site wide email about rebooting before doing so). After the reboot I re-opened the config tool and ~by golly~ it worked!! Thank the Lord!

Ok so now i have to start reading “Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services” by Paul Turley, Todd Bryant, James Counihan, Dave Duvarney.

-Kevin