Presenting at Tech Ed Australia 2010

August 11, 2010 by Mark Rhodes Leave a Comment

I’ve had some very good fortune this year and will be presenting two sessions this year at Tech Ed Australia 2010.

My two sessions are :

1.  ARC203 – Cloud Secret Sauce and what you can cook with it.

Thursday 9:45 AM – Meeting Room 5

Hosting services poses unique challenges, and for good reason – exposing services to 6 billion people has to be secure, but also has to be efficient to be commercially viable. Enteprises can learn how to improve security, efficiencies and services by utilising the methods and principles applied in hosting cloud services in their own infrastructure. This session will talk about the challenges of hosting, what tools and principles used in hosted and cloud services can be used to provide services in the enterprise such as user and department self management, control panels, identity management and automation. It will highlight the challenges and limitations of hosting cloud services from an enterprise point of view, with a focus on AD, Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, and IIS. It will also talk about Microsoft’s Dynamic Datacenter and how you can create your own private cloud.

This session is being presented with an old friend of mine Ben Fletcher, and should be an entertaining and informative look at the advantages, disadvantages and difficulties that can come with having your own private cloud.

2.  THR007 – SharePoint 2010 Server Health Monitoring

Thursday 1:15 PM – AvePoint Interactive Theater

SharePoint 2010 adds an amazing amount of new and exciting changes for IT professionals and one of those changes is the dramatic improvement to the health monitoring within SharePoint.  Join Mark as he introduces these new features, demonstrates how they work and shows you how to keep your farm healthy!

A huge thanks must go to AvePoint for this, as a major sponsor they are putting on an Interactive Theater and have asked a slew of community experts to present on a variety of interesting SharePoint 2010 topics.  I think that this theater is going to be at capacity the entire event!

I am also looking forward to Wednesday night SharePint which promises to be a lot of fun, come along to meet with Australia’s SharePoint community, have a few laughs and beers!

Looking forward to it already, if you haven’t already bought a ticket to Tech Ed, better jump on it quick as they are selling out fast!

Filed under Uncategorized

Resolving a HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 Error with a SharePoint 2010 Web Application

August 10, 2010 by Mark Rhodes Leave a Comment

This error stopped me in my tracks for a couple of hours, while just editing IIS bindings and Alternate Access Mappings my site stopped responding entirely.

Instead of displaying a lovely site, my browser just displayed a blank error message.   Turning off Friendly Error messages I found the following error message displayed :

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 03:19:45 GMT Connection: close

Unfortunately this error is not as helpful as you would think.  The only time I’ve seen similar errors with SharePoint were with 404 errors, usually because a Web Application existed, but a Site Collection did not.

I also noticed quite a few of these errors in the event log :

Unknown SQL Exception -1 occurred. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.
A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

Again this was not helpful, as I had other Web Applications on the same servers, which had no problem connecting at all!

Out of some desperation I decided to try detaching and reattaching the content database for the Web Application, and Voila!  The site came back online.   I do not have any idea why this was actually happening, however I’m putting it up here in case someone else comes across it.

Filed under SharePoint Tagged with , ,

Avoiding duplicate Service Principal Names when using setspn.exe

August 5, 2010 by Mark Rhodes Leave a Comment

Heres a quick Kerberos tip I was given the other day :

When registering a SPN with setspn.exe, rather than use setspn -a, use setspn -s  as this will take a little longer but it will check to ensure that that Service Principal Name (SPN) is not registered anywhere else.  This is  a very handy little feature!

C:\Users\Administrator>setspn -S http/server.demo.com spservice
Checking domain DC=demo,DC=com
Registering ServicePrincipalNames for CN=SPService,OU=Service Accounts,DC=demo,DC=com
http/server.demo.com
Updated object

C:\Users\Administrator>setspn -S http/server.demo.com spservice
Checking domain DC=demo,DC=com
CN=SPService,OU=Service Accounts,DC=demo,DC=com
http/server.demo.com
Duplicate SPN found, aborting operation!

How cool is that?  Wish I'd known about this a long time ago!  Bear in mind that it was only introduced in Server 2008, so it has not really been around all that long.

Filed under Kerberos Tagged with , , ,

Enabling or Disabling Claims Based Authentication

July 23, 2010 by Mark Rhodes 2 Comments

If you have already provisioned a Web Application then it may not be immediately obvious how to change the authentication over to Claims (or revert back to Classic) as this cannot be done within the GUI and can only be done within PowerShell.

Note : To do this you will need to load PowerShell and the SharePoint 2010 snap-in.

To Enable Claims :

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webapplicationurl"
$webApp.UseClaimsAuthentication = 1;
$webApp.Update()

And to revert back to Classic mode authentication just change the 1 to a 0 :

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webapplicationurl"
$webApp.UseClaimsAuthentication = 0;
$webApp.Update()

Fairly easy, but not immediately obvious :)

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South East Asia SharePoint Conference 2010

July 19, 2010 by Mark Rhodes Leave a Comment

After an extremely successful SharePoint conference earlier this year in Sydney run by the fantastic folks at SPEvents, it looks like there is going to be a South East Asia SharePoint Conference around October of this year!

The conference is going to be in Singapore on the 26th and 27th of October this year at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel.

The site is up and can be viewed at http://www.sharepointconference.asia/ and has details of the location, speakers, sponsors and more.

More details of the event can also be found at the following sites :

Linkedin: http://events.linkedin.com/SharePoint-Conference-South-East-Asia/pub/364552
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SharePoint-Conference-South-East-Asia/135980859759693
Twitter: #SPCSEA @spcsea

If you are in South East Asia and have the opportunity to attend this conference, do not miss out!   For a wrap up of the Australian conference check out my post here

Filed under SharePoint

A new home for my blog!

July 16, 2010 by Mark Rhodes Leave a Comment

After spending the last couple of years working on a Community Server blog, I decided the best thing to do moving forward was to find a new home for my blog.

Unfortunately the version of Community Server I was using was old and fairly unusable for anything but the most basic functions.  After much deliberating I decided to move to a hosted WordPress blog, and wow I really do not regret my decision for an instant!

The most difficult part of the move was the migration of all the posts and images, this being due to the lack of functionality on Community Server.  I had to do the following to migrate :

  1. Extract all the posts from the Community Server database.
  2. Format extracted posts nicely into a CSV file
  3. Run up a Virtual Machine
  4. Install WordPress (Self-Hosted) version onto it – Use the Web PlatForm Installer for this
  5. Install the CSV Importer plug-in to wordpress
  6. Import the CSV
  7. Export a WordPress Format
  8. Tidy up any links etc, remove capitalization, remove any HTML characters
  9. Import to Hosted WordPress
  10. Upload all images
  11. One by One fix image links

This process took me a few nights to do, but was well worth it.

It only took me 3 or 4 minutes to register a domain through them as well!  And only at a cost of $5, which is amazing, I was absolutely blown away by just how simple and easy the entire process was.   It is the perfect model of how Hosted applications should work!

Anyhow, here it is at its new home – http://www.mrhodes.net.

Filed under Web

Storing your OneNote notebooks in the Cloud, the easy way!

July 2, 2010 by Mark Rhodes Leave a Comment

This morning I spent some time re-organising my OneNote notebooks, something I had not done with OneNote 2010 until now and also something that was desperately needed – the ability to publish straight out of the box into the cloud without requiring anything but a Live ID!

Having multiple computers one of the annoyances I had with 2007 was keeping my notebooks in sync.  Until now the best way was either a fileshare on a network drive, or storing the files within a SharePoint library.  Unfortunately one of those does not lend itself well to someone who rarely connects to a single network, and the other one can be cost prohibitive.  The result?  Multiple copies of the same files!

Before too long your one note folders start to look like this.

Today when I created a brand new notebook I noticed that there was a “Web” button now in OneNote 2010 and by clicking on this it is now staggeringly simple to have a notebook which is sync’d straight from your skydrive simply by entering your Live credentials!

This is probably the most exciting feature for me of all the additions in Office 2010, and it is going to make my life a breeze.  Nice work to the Office Team!

Filed under Office Tagged with ,

Australian SharePoint Conference Wrap Up

June 18, 2010 by Mark Rhodes 1 Comment

The Australian SharePoint Conference finished up yesterday evening. It was a fantastic couple of days immersed in all things SharePoint as well as getting a chance to hang out again with a bunch of the Australian SharePoint community members, and of course share a few drinks with them :)

I was able to present my session on one of everybody’s favourite topics – Content Deployment!

Content Deployment Bootcamp
Content Deployment is one of the final frontiers where SharePoint administrators fear to tread. Mark will explore Content Deployment from its origins to what to expect with SharePoint 2010 and covers his experiences when using content deployment in production environments, including tips and tricks to get your content deployment running smoothly, and how to keep it that way!

The session went quite well and I had a great amount of participation from the Audience, including giving away four hand made pens that I made myself, these seemed to be fairly well received and I like to think they were a unique touch.

Slides from my session are available here : http://www.slideshare.net/markrhodes/content-deployment-bootcamp

I was also really fortunate to participate in the “Ask the Experts” session with Elaine Van Bergen, Todd Bleeker, Arpan Shah and Paul Swider.  This was a great way to finish off the conference as we were able to have a good time answering questions as well as giving a few laughs to the audience.

I was also able to participate in an excellent podcast by Jeremy Thake which will be available fairly soon on http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com. The podcast was on the topic of “Sandbox Solutions” and was moderated by Jeremy and included myself, Arpan Shah, Todd Bleeker and Paul Swider.  I will post the link as soon as it is published.

**Update** – Podcast available at http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SPPodCasts/2010/06/18/SPWebCast+018+-+Sandboxed+Solutions+interview+with+Arpan+Shah,+Todd+Bleeker,+Paul+Swider+and+Mark+Rhodes

The conference itself was incredibly well organized and I think has set the bar in what to expect from these events within Australia.  Huge thanks to Debbie Ireland, Mark Orange, James Milne, Kathy Hughes and Brendan Law, as well as the crew at http://spevents.co.nz/default.aspx for such a great time.

I also promised to provide the links for my resources for my session, so here they are :

Stefan Gossner : http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner

Spencer Harbar : http://www.harbar.net

Maxime Bombardier : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/maximeb/

Content Deployment Wizard : http://spdeploymentwizard.codeplex.com/

Microsoft Content Deployment Poster : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=de010583-e5fe-4c4b-a633-e57312336aef&displaylang=en

Filed under SharePoint Tagged with , ,

Status Code 87 when trying to Validate Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster

June 9, 2010 by Mark Rhodes Leave a Comment

Just came across this funky little error when trying to validate a cluster on Windows Server 2008 R2's Failover Cluster Manager.  In particular it comes up when attempting the "List All Disks" step.

"Clustering Validation check fails: Failed to prepare storage for testing on node ClusterNodeX Status 87"

Nothing really helpful shows up in the log files, and somewhat frustratingly only came across the solution by trial and error.  It seems that the tiny little boot partition at the start of the primary operating system disk (I think this is new with the Windows Build 6.1 Kernel [Windows Server 2008 R2]) does not have a drive letter assigned or mount point assigned.  Just assign a drive letter using diskmgmt.msc or diskpart for both nodes of your cluster and it will disappear and you will be able to validate.

There were other volumes that did not have a mountpoint or drive letter assigned, so I am assuming this error is specific to the primary disk.

Seems pretty silly, hope this is something that gets addressed by the upcoming Service Pack for Windows Server 2008 R2.

 

Filed under Windows Server Tagged with ,

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