Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

It is amazing that how small things in SharePoint can turn out to be puzzling and make you scratch your head for hours. Imagine , you are installing MOSS 2007 in a stand-alone environment , easiest installation of all , right? it’s a piece of cake for you and you’re pretty confident that you can get it done in a snap. Well, you are right because you install everything in couple minutes. It is 5:30 PM and it is time to go home (For those of you who don’t start your day at 10 AM like myself and go to bed next day at 2:00 AM 😉 ).Your site comes up with no problem and last thing you would like to check is Central Administration Site. First thing that catches your eyes is that RED sign on the left side of the page saying that you are not done yet. Shoot! – Sorry , but Central admin doesn’t care that you have a wife at home, and children, and hockey match to watch, and you love your country. It keeps complaining until you FIX him!!

Okay, what’s the quickest way to get rid of this without going through administration task list?

1) Start Excel Services, WSS Search ,MOSS Search

2) Provision SSP (Shared Services)

3) STOP Excel Services, WSS Search, MOSS Search (if you don’t need em)

When you start “Windows SharePoint Services Search” , you get the following page to fill out:

 

 

 

 

You are installing this in a single server topology , so you go ahead and fill out User Name fields with a local accounts and you hit “OK”.

 

 

 

 

You get this error in 12 Hive log file:

The call to SPSearchServiceInstance.Provision (server Mossdiff’) failed. Setting back to previous status ‘Disabled’. Setting back to previous status’ Disabled ‘.

If you don’t come across this post or another hint posted somewhere, it probably takes you a while until you figure out that you have to use ComputerName\AccountName in User Name fields to get around this issue.

 

 

 

 

Same thing applies to MOSS Search settings too. Either use Computer Name\Account Name or Domain Name\Account Name. Please, please read the descriptions besides each section carefully, for some sections such as “Service Account” you shouldn’t use a built-in account (i.e. Local Service or Network Service) for security reasons and for it to access the database and content index and for some sections such as “Content Access Account” you shouldn’t use an administrator account. Those descriptions are not there to fill out the page with. They are there for us to read and decide what action to take. Another important thing here is when you set up your SSP site. When you are setting SSP , make sure that you choose the right process account for its application pool otherwise the new site you create for SSP won’t be listed under current Web Applications that you can choose for SSP. It is 8 PM and you are still at work or maybe you have read this post and I have been able to save you some time .Either case, have a good night and never underestimate SharePoint 😉

I finally got my awesome SharePoint workstation that I always wanted to have and added the new baby to my rapidly-growing collection of computers/servers that I keep in my basement:). Now , I really have to think about a solution to lower the noise generated by my computers ,in particular the new comer , otherwise I feel like I am riding a motorcycle after 10 minutes of being in the basement.

Here is another picture taken from another angle. My SharePoint machine specifications are: I) SUPERMICRO H8DCE-O Dual 940 NVIDIA nForce4 Professional 2200 Extended ATX Server Motherboard:It supports Dual CPU and Dual-core Opteron.It is equipped with both PCI and PCI express slots. There is also onboard SATA or RAID functionality which makes it even nicer. [picture] II) 2 dual core AMD Opteron 280 (WOF) 2.4GHz Socket 940 processors and 2 processor coolers – MASTER RR-CCH-L9U1-GP 92mm Hyper TX2:I confess that this the best processor I have ever owned. Super fast and rock solid! Processor coolers are a bit loud, but it has spectacular airflow, and keep the CPUs very cool [picture] [picture] III) 8 GB of Crucial 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Server Memory [picture] IV) PNY VCG8600GXPB GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card:Well, I am not a gamer or Vista guy so it works perfectly for me, but its 2 DVI outputs is really cool for hooking up two monitors to the box. [picture] V) SUPERMICRO CSE-743T-650B Black Steel / Plastic 4U Rackmount Case: It is a fantastic box with lots of room inside. It comes with 6 built-in cooling (also hotswap) to handle the hottest processors and it has 8 hot-swap SATA slots, mine has only five units so there is still room for another 3 extra hard drives. It is not a good looking box , but who cares?!! The only problem is that my small home server room is almost full with other computers , so I have to keep this next to my desk and admittedly it is loud!! very loud…I changed the BIOS setting to put the fans into SUPER QUIET MODE , but it is still loud. [picture] VI) 750 GB of storage by five SATA drives (hotswap) with 150 GB capacity each, 1.5 Gb/s retrieval speed, 16 MB Cache, 10,000 RPM: It is god-damn fast , probably the fastest hard drive that I have ever seen ! I liked the crystal-clear lens on the drive to let you see inside and witness the drive in action. 10,000 RPM sounds promising for running multiple MOSS virtual machines ! [picture]

so far, I have run 4 simultaneous virtual servers (a MOSS Medium Server farm) on this computer and it performs awesome!

I have been toying with the idea of moving to a new blog for a while, but my tight schedule lately has left me almost no time to make this happen. Finally today at the Amsterdam International Airport and in a very romantic atmosphere I had the chance to work on the new blog before catching the next flight to Dubai! I will keep the old blog for a while and gradually move the stuff over, but I no longer post anything to the old blog.Please subscribe to the new RSS feed here.Thanks

I have installed TFS couple of times, but it has been always in a dual-server mode which basically puts the Team Foundation data and the application tiers on separate computers. Last week, I was asked by a colleague of mine to give him a hand on installing TFS in a single server mode. Well, I am not a TFS expert, but when it comes to a technology that somehow relates to SharePoint somewhere, I step in and learn enough about that technology to protect myself for rainy days in future. As a result, I have been involved in many integration projects that SharePoint is the other end or it is used under the hood. Despite the fact that I am known for 100% SharePoint architecting and dev , I *really* enjoy this type of work a lot more.It is much more fun plus the exposure you can get to other complementary technologies around SharePoint. Obviously, the challenge is always to stay focused and indeed not to be derailed.Okay, back to the issue. I agree wholeheartedly that TFS documentation is really good , but I think it is a bit complicated for many users, definitely lacks some screenshots and a very important tip which is the fact that TFS expects SharePoint configuration database to be called STS_Config_TFS. One other thing that I have found very important (and not emphasized enough in the documentation) is to create and use right user accounts for various steps during the installation process.Having said this , I decided to create a document that describes the installation steps in a more summarized way along with many screenshots of the important steps.

Toronto SharePoint Camp 2007 is only 3 days away – and we need your help. 

If you have already registered to help us or if you are interested, then tonight is the right time to get more involved.Please join other volunteers at 6:00pm at the Toronto SharePoint User Group venue at 2 Bloor West, so that we can allocate job roles, functions, and responsibilities surrounding the event this Saturday.

Thank you in advance for donating your time to support the Toronto SharePoint Camp 2007.

See you tonight,