Of Ones and Zeros

Logged in as System Account

Posted on 31. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

Had an issue today where a developer was testing a web part that required a user profile, and an exception was being thrown that the user profile did not exist.  We verified in the SSP that the user profile indeed existed, and also used the "stsadm -o sync" command to force a profile synchronization.  However, we discovered that SharePoint was not seeing the actual user name that the user was logged in as, instead SharePoint saw it as "SHAREPOINTSystem".  This led us to the following forum thread:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1195418&SiteID=1

What ended up being the issue is that the developer had configured the SharePoint application pool to run as the same identity that he was logging into SharePoint as.  We changed the configured identity in Central Admin -> Operations -> Service Accounts to use Network Service instead and the issue was resolved.

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Great new Visual Studio color theme

Posted on 28. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

The other day Tomas Restrepo released a new Visual Studio Color Theme called Distant Shores.  It is a low-contrast theme with a dark background, and I must admit I am a BIG FAN!  Have a look at the following screen shot.  BTW – The font I am using is Damien Guard’s Envy CodeR font that Tomas Restrepo recommends in his blog posting.

Give it a shot!  Your eyes will thank you!

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Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’

Posted on 25. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

Came in the office today to an issue with a MOSS box that was recently stood up in our lab environment.  The server was configured to do automatic updates, and installed SharePoint updates overnight.  Turns out the upgrade portion of the update failed, and perusing the diagnostic logs revealed the following error:

Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’

I came across the following blog posting that ultimately supplied the remedy:

Bill Baer : KB934525 Troubleshooting "Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’."

Option #4 took care of things:

• On the machine where psconfig failed to start the SPAdmin service run:

%commonprogramfiles%Microsoft SharedWeb Server Extensions12BINpsconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force

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Did I miss a memo? Where is everyone going?

Posted on 13. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

A movement of sorts is afoot in the blogosphere.  Apparently everyone who has a popular blog has seen fit to alter their employment status in the past 6 months:

Joel Oleson:  http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2008/03/12/moving-on.aspx

Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001074.html

Scott Hanselman: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BlueBadge.aspx

Craig Shoemaker: http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/craigshoemaker/archive/2007/11/14/366194.aspx

Simply an observation.  Bizarre.

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Mounting Virtual PC VHD images on host OS

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

Found a great new trick today for mounting Virtual PC VHD files as drives within the host operating system.  In the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 installer is a utility called "VHDMount".  If you install Virtual Server you can elect to only install this utility (if you do a custom install).  This will create a directory "[drive]:Program FilesMicrosoft Virtual ServerVHDMount" within it is a file called VHDMount.exe.  This is a command-line utility that you can use to mount your VHD files.  I regularly use a VHD drive that I share with multiple VPC’s that has common development utilities, and being able to populate that drive without having to boot up one of the VPC’s as a big plus.

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Internet Explorer (IE) crashing accessing SharePoint lists

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by admin.

If you have clients with a mix of Office 2003 and Office 2007 components (for instance Word 2003, Excel 2003, but SharePoint Designer 2007), they may experience intermittent Internet Explorer crashes.  The following hotfix from Microsoft corrects this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888

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Import Spreadsheet – “Cannot connect to the server at this time.”

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by admin.

Ran into an issue today with trying to import an Excel 2003 spreadsheet into a SharePoint list.  SharePoint would load Excel, then you select the cells in Excel that you want to import, you click Import and Excel responds with "Cannot connect to the server at this time."  After a long while searching for a solution, I came across the following link:

WSS FAQ – I cannot import from Excel 2003 to WSS. What’s…

Basically the solution was 2 workarounds:

a.) Import the spreadsheet into a root site, then create a list template and use that to create the list within a subsite.

or

b.) Use Excel’s List Publishing feature to publish directly to the subsite.

I tested both options and they each worked equally well, I ultimately went with option B as it seemed a cleaner solution.

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