So the scenario is that I have an instance of Windows Server 2012 (Windows Server 8 Beta) running on VMware Workstation 8 on my laptop.

Adding Hyper V role to the server

Speed bump

The other error that has been recorded:

Fix:

Shutdown the Windows Server 2012

Browse to your VM location and open the vmx file and append at the end the following two lines

Save and power up your VM

Let’s try that again

Now you should be able to go on and configure your Hyper- V role on the server.

This is a total hack! I mean please do a little more research before Production deployment J ….

Well we all know about this one http://wellytonian.com/2011/05/sharepoint-2010-and-crm-2011-integration/ Integrating SharePoint document library within CRM.

But we had a new requirement to get CRM Lists to be displayed as web part within SharePoint 2010. I knew there was a fix for CRM 4.0 list web parts to work within MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0.

You can download that web part here http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=20651

Whoop get to go home early today. #fail.

The installer just wouldn’t recognize the SharePoint 2010 install. Here are the screenshots

What? But on the download page

Weird. That means the web part file is within that exe. So I decided to try and extract whatever is within the listwebpart.exe

And we have a winner

PowerShell the bad boy into the farm

Have the solution deploy to all your web applications and now try and add the following web part

Have fun!

My current lab environment has the following:

2 Web Front Ends which are sitting behind 2 Clustered Load balancers that I use. Query Role is also setup within this layer, so the Index are being written onto this server.

2 Application Servers that has been configured with 1 crawler per server.

The load balancers as well as the SharePoint serves are for this instance running off a single Esxi host. The reason I mention it here is that the content that is being crawled is huge and I had to tweak to get NO ERRORS

Some of the errors that I noticed with this setup

Error-1

“An unrecognized HTTP response was received when attempting to crawl this item. Verify whether the item can be accessed using your browser.”

Across all my content Sources , Not a good sign

Error -2

“Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has “Full Read” permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. ( Error from SharePoint site: HttpStatusCode Unauthorized The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized. )”

Error -3

“The secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server was invalid and this item will not be crawled.”

Error-4

“Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has “Full Read” permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. ( Error from SharePoint site: HttpStatusCode Unauthorized The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized. )”

The last error was one of the most annoying once that I had because , all the 3 content Sources were having successful crawls and incremental crawls except my SSL secured Anonymous Site which is an extended site of another content source.

Weird.

Typical things to check out for

1. Check your crawl account has full read permission to access your content sources.

1. Disable Loopback Check –

   1	New-ItemProperty HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa -Name "DisableLoopbackCheck" -value "1" -PropertyType dword

Fixes

All my content sources use HTTPS. That would mean all 4 content sources would either need 4 different IP addresses or use a wildcard certificate or since it’s a lab just one standard Self Signed Certificate. This would mean you are bound to hit the Certificate Error Issue.

Search out of the box doesn’t know how to get over this problem but can be configured to skip the SSL error.

Out of the box your Farm Search Configuration looks like this

Click on Ignore SSL warnings and change the setting to Yes

As mentioned before, the setup uses a cluster of Load balancers. Hence when either of the crawlers starts crawling the content from one of the APP servers, they naturally go hit the DNS which is pointed at the Load balancer cluster. #fail.

The fix is to have a local HOST File entry on all your Crawl Servers, which in most scenarios are your Application Layer servers.

In a farm environment with Load balancers , networking equipment that go to sleep and DNS replication and every sort of complication under the sun you can think of , you may want to increase your Time-Out period under Farm Administration.

Peace!

In order to test some search functionality for a project that I am involved with, I decided to add another APP server to my SharePoint farm. Currently the farm:

Basically the farm is currently at August 2011 CU level. I finished building the base Windows 2008 R2 SP1 App server and installed SP2010 binaries onto it which is already slipstreamed with August CU and SP1 updates.

So to join the farm, I started PSconfig and opted to join a farm and bang

This is really weird since it has August CU updates slipstreamed when I installed the binaries. Moreover it is not saying that it is missing all the patches for August CU as well. The links on the message is also prompting me to download the whole August CU package again and install. Weird.

So I decided to confirm if August CU got installed properly or not. Pointed the app server to look at another farm that I knew wasn’t running August CU but rather just SP1 and bang

Message now complains the servers in that farm T1 and T2 don’t have August CU. Weird. If August CU wasn’t installed on this server properly I should have had no problem joining this farm. Weird.

Copied August CU onto the server. Ran it and it finished in less than 2 minutes. Weird

And bang

What happened is that some files didn’t get installed using a slipstreamed August CU. Weird.

Catch y’all next time on Channel Weird.

Peace.

One of my current projects involves building a farm with Multiple SharePoint servers. One of the painful processes is doing an IISReset across the farm. There are few solutions out there and this is the one I wrote couple of days back using their logic.

Peace!