bloggingIT

When installing Sharepoint 3.0 Service Pack 1 onto a fresh Windows Server 2003 installation, you can sometimes fall foul of Sharepoint complaining that ASP.net 2 is not installed:

“This product requires ASP.NET v2.0″

I found the solution over at Sharepoint Blogs. Run the following command on the server:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.net\Framework\v2.0.50727\Aspnet_regiis.exe -i

This will register .NET 2 with IIS and you should be able to use Sharepoint properly from that point on.

I’ve been playing with the different views in Sharepoint, trying to sort out the Intranet homepage over at St. Peter’s.

The problem they have is that they don’t want announcements to appear on the main screen, but they also don’t want to have to click through to read the announcements.

I set up a new view using just the headers and the creation date, which seemed to be fine until Jason posted an announcement to say that the front page had been changed. Humorously, this didn’t actually appear.

After emailing me, I discovered that if I set the view to not show posts that have expired, I automatically exclude posts with no expiry date. Somewhat of a nuisance as the there is nothing in sharepoint that allows you to check for null dates.

A quick Google later, and I found This Much I Know, which pointed me in the direction of creating a calculated column and then putting some code to place a new date in, if the expiry is blank.

=OR([Expires] = "", [Expires] >= [Today])

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I found where you create those columns and set it up. I reset the view on the front page, and voila! It worked.

Now that MS Office 2007 is doing the rounds, I suppose it’s time to lookat some of its shortcomings.

It has a few when it comes to deployment. The biggest nuisance being deployment.

You have four options:

• Install it on a PC manually (not great)
• Deploy through group policy with no customisations
• Use a deployment system such as SMS
• Use a computer startup script

You may as well just say “no” to the first one. Anything more than a handful of PCs and you have a tedious task.

Group Policy has always been my method of choice. Most of my clients have less than 100 PCs, so Group Policy deployment is ideal. But as pointed out in the list, you cannot customise the installation with any defaults.

SMS is out. It’s not worth explaining to clients why it’s a good idea to buy software that makes my life easier. Even though the effort and management might simplify things somewhat.

So we’re stuck with computer startup scripts. Another method I hate - but if you want to control Office Deployments, then this is the way to do it. Thankfully, Aaron Parker has posted some startup scripts to help with this using the MSP method.

If you are using a network with WSUS, then updates become a non-issue, and I think that the only time to need to redeploy is if you decide to change the application packages that you want. At which point, you could check that executables of the programs exist or record your own registry entries that you can check for.

It’s not a great method (I’ve managed to avoid having to use ANY computer startup scripts in 2000-based networks) - but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work. Especially if you make sure to use the quiet options in the Setup /admin tool.

Office, eh?

I’ve been having numerous errors in the event log appearing on one of my servers from the ESENT service:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: ESENT
Event Category: Database Corruption
Event ID: 467
Date: 18/05/2007
Time: 09:33:06
User: N/A
Computer: SERVER123
Description:
ntfrs (5660) Index GChangeOrderGuid of table OUTLOGTable00002 is corrupted (0).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

These errors are appearing regularly, and contain various tables with problems.

After scouring eventid.net and the Microsoft support site - I eventually found a very useful Powerpoint presentation that outlines various methods of recovering poorly or corrupt active directory databases.

Although not a specific answer to the problem, it does provide useful guidelines in the best practices for repairing or reinstalling and domain controller, as well as some useful advice such as carrying out a metadata cleanup.

I’ll be following the guide to try and resolve the database errors on this server, and hopefully it will work out nicely.

It happens enough times. You’re busy reinstalling Windows for someone when you find that you can’t install Windows Updates because the internet connection available is slowly than a milk float delivering breeze blocks instead of milk.

In so far as keeping up-to-date, the issue is no longer “How soon can the updates be installed on the computer?” It is actually “Can I even download updates on my computer?”

The odds are that if you are using Windows XP pre-SP2, the answer is simply ‘no’. Whenever you’re behind on a service pack, Microsoft likes to ensure that this becomes part of the download set. And that 200MB+ download might take a little while on dial-up. Once you’ve completed this, you’ll probably find another 100MB+ worth of updates to install afterwards.

Thankfully, there are a number of ways around this.

Downloading the redistributable versions of the various service packs is a piece of cake - they can be downloaded from the Microsoft website without too much effort. The subsequent rollups prove to be more of a nuisance.

Enter AutoPatcher. This is a handy little project for those folk who have all of those problems, and then some. What I particularly like is the semi-frequent updates that do not require you to download a complete CD of updates. So having a full download and the latest update CD does the job nicely. On my next visit to this school where I need the files, I’ll hopefully be able to install the updates with the minimum of fuss - then I’ll be a happy chappy.

Go get it!

I found a useful article about some concepts that might help administrators repair, recover or transfer an Exchange Server.

Not sure if it will help with SBS though…