Of Ones and Zeros

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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A.D.D. Be Gone!

Posted on 14. Jan, 2008 by bryan.

Working with SharePoint, particularly within VPN environments, can be a focus-challenging task. Write new master page, compile new web part, wait for SharePoint to recompile (okay, more specifically ASP.NET), lose focus, fire up FireFox, browse net for 15 minutes, forget what you were working on, remember, and continue work. Now I am a BIG fan of multi-monitor setups, I feel it generally improves productivity. However, when I find myself staring at IE while waiting on SharePoint, I will often glance at my other monitor and see all those pretty desktop icons, or a tempting FireFox browser session, and I’ll fill time while waiting on SharePoint.

The thought occurred to me earlier this week — what if I could black out the rest of my screen and see ONLY the window that am currently working on? Sure, in full-screen scenarios that may be simple, but when you regularly work within VPC’s and have a multi-monitor setup with different screen resolutions, the solution is not as simple. So I did a google search for this very creation and alas, I am not alone! Over at www.lifehack.org I was able to find a fantastic utility application to achieve exactly what I want, and it is called Dropcloth written by Adam Pash.

Once you launch Dropcloth it will take up residence in your systray. The “Settings” menu provides the ability to change the screen overlay, whether Dropcloth appears in the taskbar, whether Dropcloth should keep the active application above the Dropcloth, the transparency level of the overlay, and a hotkey.

When you want to stay focused on a given task and see only that window, simply press the hotkey combination, in my case Ctrl-Shift-C. The rest of your screen will black out (or whatever color you have chosen). In order to remove the dropcloth you can press the hotkey combination again and your screen will be restored.

As an added bonus, this utility is great for taking screenshots. In that instance it may be best to set the background color to #ffffff (white).

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1-800-GOOG-411

Posted on 17. Dec, 2007 by bryan.

If you haven’t checked out 1-800-GOOG-411 yet, you should.  It is 100% voice recognition driven directory assistance (wow that was a mouthful).  You call up, it asks for the location.  It will then respond back with how it heard the location and you can confirm.  It will then ask for either a category or business name.  Once you state it, it will begin to respond with search results.  When you hear a result that you like, you tell it the number and it will connect you. 

The best part of all is that the service is completely free!  No more $1.00 411 calls!  Check it out next time you get ready to dial 411.

1-800-GOOG-411

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“The page you are attempting to save has been modified by another user since you began editing”

Posted on 17. Dec, 2007 by bryan.

I recently ran into an issue where editing content within a Content Editor web part would cause the following message to appear in the Publishing Toolbar:

The page you are attempting to save has been modified by another user since you began editing

At that point you would have to select “Save and Overwrite Changes” in order to proceed. This would happen any time that you edited a page, provided that you first selected “Edit Page” from the Site Actions menu. If you simply clicked the drop-down for the web part and selected “Modify Shared Web Part”, this problem would not appear.

After spending a significant amount of time troubleshooting the issue it was narrowed down to one of the customizations that was made to the master page. The Site Actions menu had been relocated to under the Quick Links menu.

I went back to the default.master page that ships stock with MOSS to try to reproduce the issue. Sure enough, if I put the Site Actions menu after the Publishing Console, I would receive the “page has been modified” error. If I put that Site Actions menu prior to the Publishing Console, everything would work fine.

After a little more than 5 hours troubleshooting the issue, it was determined that simply relocating the Site Actions menu to the top of the page was the simplest solution, however I would like to understand why it cannot follow the Publishing Console, or what needs to be done so it can.

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Cleaning Up Orphaned Webs

Posted on 24. Oct, 2007 by bryan.

Ran into an issue today with installing the October 9th SharePoint Security Patch. During the content database upgrade I received several errors that certain sites and webs were missing. This is due to the staging content database being migrated from a development content database, and there are slight differences in the configuration databases between the two environments. In any event, I found the following posting from Cory Burns that took care of the issue:

How to Clean Orphans from your environment.

(Be smart have backups prior whenever you are performing maintenance on your farm, use suggestions at your own risk.)

Configuration Orphans: These are the orphans that reside in your configuration database but have no child counterpart (contentDB entry). Cleaning these are the easiest of all the orphans. Simply detach the content database from your farm that was included in the result set and reattach it. This will refresh the sitelist that is tied to that content database and will remove the stale entry.

Sharepoint Tips and Tricks : Sharepoint Orphans Explained

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Global Navigation Error After Creating Site from Site Template

Posted on 28. Sep, 2007 by bryan.

Follow along:

1. Create a new site template from SharePoint Designer.  Doesn’t really matter what the site template is for or what options you choose (based on my experience).
2. Go into SharePoint and create a new site based on the new custom Site Template.
3. Note that your top navigation bar (the global navigation) should now have a “Home” tab, and an “Error” tab.
4. Click refresh.
5. Your top navigation bar now appears as normal!

I’ll chalk this one up as a “feature”.

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Unable to login to SharePoint Portal from SharePoint Server

Posted on 27. Sep, 2007 by bryan.

One of our SharePoint servers at work was updated with the most recent round of security patches the other day.  Unfortunately, the result of this update was the inability to login to the SharePoint Portal from the server, and the search crawler not being able to access the site.

After some significant research on the matter I came across http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 which indicates that an IIS website that is using Integrated Windows Authentication and the URL is different from the computer name, will result in a 401.1 error.  The fix is to add the other names of the computer into a registry key and restart IIS.  After following the instructions in the knowledge base article I was able to login to the site from the server, and the search crawler was once again able to crawl the content.

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Bluetooth Headset and Google Talk

Posted on 12. Sep, 2007 by bryan.

Just to see if it would work, I decided the other day to pair my Motorola HS3 Bluetooth Headset with my Lenovo Thinkpad T60.

I have to admit that I am really digging using my headset with Google Talk and Messenger. I like having the option to switch into a voice chat from IM but maintain a form of privacy by using the headset. I think I’ll leave my headset paired with my computer and leave my phone out of it!

UPDATE:  Okay, I paved my laptop the other day and installed Vista, now I no longer have a working Bluetooth headset!  Apparently the Bluetooth stack in Vista does not include the drivers to support a Bluetooth headset .

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