WSS Search not working!!
As some of you may be aware, WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) and SPS2003 (SharePoint Portal Server) don't use the same indexing and search technology. WSS uses SQL based full-text searching and SPS uses the MSSearch service.
We had 2 similar issues (but will explain individually) with 2 separate WSS and SPS servers recently.
One of the servers is our development instance of SPS2003 and the other is our newly migrated production intranet SPS2003 server.
On the development server we noticed that when you search for content that would exist in a WSS site from the portal, the search would return the expected results, but when you use the Search from the WSS site itself, it would not return anything.
Resolution here was to rebuild the Full-Text Catalog that WSS creates in the PortalName_Site database. It is usually called ix_PortalName_Site.
On the production intranet server however, the portal returned no results from the WSS sites aswell as the WSS site search themselves. Upon closer inspection I noticed that there was no full-text catalog created in the PortalName_Site database. Worse still if I manually tried to create it, I got the following error:
So I found on the web a way to reinstall the Full-Text Catalog component on a SQL server, to do this I had to spoof the install into thinking that full-text catalog was not installed. How? Well all you do is locate the following key in the Registry:
{E07FDDA7-5A21-11d2-9DAD-00C04F79D434} which is in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE \MICROSOFT\MSSQLSERVER\Tracking
and rename or delete it (I renamed it with an X in front)
Then insert the SQL Server installation CD again and modify/add components to existing install. Select Full-Text Search as the component, and continue with the installation wizard.
Now we had an instance of Full-Text searching that we could create catalogs in without error.
I then let WSS create its own Full-Text Catalog. To do this, go to SharePoint Central Administration of your SPS portal and then select Windows SharePoint Services. Click on "Configure Full Text Search" and then disable the checkbox "Enable full-text search and index component" and click OK.
Then go back in and re-enable it, this will then go off and create the full-text catalog that should have been there in the first place.
Weird I know but true (make sure to reapply the SP3a after re-installing the full-text search component)
IIS Logfile issue with small SPS2003 Server Farm
I have installed the following configuration for a customer of ours.
Server-name: XXX1
Operating System: Windows 2003 Server (including relevant updates)
Server applications: Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Network: Attached to Windows 2000 Active Directory
Server-name: XXX2
Operating System: Windows 2003 Server (including relevant updates)
Server applications: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with SP3a
Network: Attached to Windows 2000 Active Directory
SharePoint 2003 was installed in a small server farm environment, with XXX1 hosting SharePoint and using XXX2 as its SQL repository.
I migrated 130,000 documents from a SharePoint Portal Server 2001 based workspace to the new SharePoint 2003 implementation (on servers above) using the Microsoft migration tools called SPIN and SPOUT.
Now on to the Technical Issue itself.
Initially the customer reported an issue with the Management of Audiences. They tried to create an audience of specific NT users (the SharePoint 2003 installation was already connected to AD and have relevant profiles and users imported) and then tried to compile those audiences. Then the “Manage Audiences” page displayed a message saying:
“An error has occurred while accessing SQL database or system resources. If this is the first time you have seen this message, please try again later. If this problem persists, please contact your administrator.”
We then analysed the Diagnostic Logfiles within the SharePoint Central Administration, and found the following 2 error messages:
“Error retrieving audience schedule!
InnerException Message: Logon Failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer”
And
“Could not find stored procedure: dbo.Orgle_job_UpdateLastTouch”
Then our customer reported that their system partition had been max’d out due to the IIS logfiles for the W3SVC1 (i.e. Default WebSite – where SPS is installed) growing to nearly 22GB’s.
This file was obviously too big to open, and so we moved it and let IIS create a new one. We let IIS run for a few minutes, and then stopped IIS and opened the logfile. It had already reached 1MB in size and there was a reoccurrence of the following POST’s and GET’s about 20 times a second.
Here is 4 seconds of IIS logfile entries (please find the complete logfile attached, along with the Application, System and Security event logs):
2004-11-16 13:03:57 POST /_vti_bin/sitedata.asmx - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 2 2148074254
2004-11-16 13:03:57 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 - 401 1 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
2004-11-16 13:03:58 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll - 80 200 0 0
(I have removed any references to ip and NT info in the above logfiles)
A hotfix (
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;837249) for the Audiences that I received off Microsoft seem to fix the Audiences issues we were experiencing before.
Although the SharePoint installation seems to be functioning fine now, the IIS logfiles are still filling with these entries.
We have disabled logging on the Default Website, just so the SharePoint server will stop falling over every time the IIS logfile fills the system partition.
We have also logged a call with Microsoft, to see if we can fix it, I'll add a comment as soon as we have fixed it.
MCMS and Accessibility
We've been looking at Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 for the past 4-5 months, and have completed a pilot project for a Local Authority in Ireland.
MCMS is a great product in many ways:
- It's integration with Visual Studio
- It's integration with SharePoint (both for searching and document publishing)
- The separation of developers from authors
But 1 major area in which MCMS falls down, is with generating Accessible websites. Yep sure it's easy to generate a template that is accessible, but making sure the content that the template generates is accessible is a totally different ball game. Because local legislation with regard to Government based websites dictates that all such websites should produce accessible HTML, this was of great concern for us at the time.
Since then however, we are well down the road on the way to generating accessible websites with MCMS. Areas where MCMS falls down with accessibility are:
- Out of the box user controls for navigation, breadcrumbs, etc
- Out of the box HTML and Image placeholders
- MetaData
- Visual Studio "isms" (as I call them, with regard to HTML tag modificaiton when switching to design view)
We did the following to overcome some of these issues:
- Developed our own Navigation and Breadcrumb user controls, that generated "bog standard" HTML using the CMS Publishing API
- Developed custom HTML and Image placeholders, that did find a replaces for certain HTML tags, made sure images had alt text, made sure table columns had descriptions, etc. A Microsoft constultant in the UK was responsible for this, and it works fine. We did look at the MSIB plus pack that has been developed by cScape and IOKO and is “FREE”, but felt that we had more control over the custom one, that's not to say we could change our minds in the future
- Developed custom MetaData placeholder
- Had to use workarounds, in that you don't swtch to design view on template development. This should be fixed by MS. We also used a HTTP Module that parsed the page for tags that we knew could have been modified and changed them to lower case, and changed BR tags to /BR tags.
There is very little documentation about this on the web, and had to work very closely with Microsoft to find a resolution for many of these issues (which they were very helpful about).
If anyone has any questions around our approach, just post a comment!
Custom Navigtion in SharePoint using Areas
We had a recent requirement to provide a fixed navigation control for a SharePoint Area using as much out of the box functionality as possible.
As you may be aware, when you select an Area in SharePoint 2003, two .net server controls provide the navigational experience. One is called the BreadCrumbTrail component, and basically shows the SharePoint user where they are in the Area navigation. The other is called the CategoryNavigationWebPart server control and displays the sub-Areas and other highlighted content from the currently select Area in the hierarchy.
What we wanted to achieve was that when you select a sub-Area of an existing Area, the other Areas at the same level remain in the CategoryNavigationWebPart server control. Hence providing a fixed navigation when switching between Areas at the same level.
Our initial solution was to modify the default.aspx for each sub-Area and change the following line of code: SPSWC:CategoryNavigationWebPart runat="server" id="VerticalNavBar" DisplayStyle="VerticalOneLayer"
to include the CurrentCategoryID property. This will allow you to put a reference to the CatID of the parent Area, to which you want the fixed navigation.
This works fine, but we need to test that Service Pack installations won't overwrite these modifications (currently testing with SP1 for SPS2003). Also potential deployment scenarios will have to be thought out and tested.
Eventually selected and setup my Blog
After months of deliberating on "whether I should develope my own blogging software", "should I buy blogging software" or "should I use my ISP's blogging offering", I have decided to go with Blogger.
I felt they offered all standard blogging capabilities in an easy to use environment (plus its free, yippee).
So what will be on my blog?
- As I'm a .Net developer primarily focusing on Microsoft server based products, such as BizTalk, SharePoint and CMS, I will post as many of my technical findings as possible
- Also, I'd like to cover some of my opinions on current affairs and personal interests.
So as is customary with new blogging sites, any postings within this site will be of the opinion of the author and at the time of posting will be as accurate as possible. So in other words, Graham's not always right (shhh don't tell Vicky!).
Thanks and enjoy my blog!
