Yesterday I had a frustrating experience trying to install .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 in one of our dev environments. Due to some, frankly bizarre, dependency problems I found myself having to uninstall .Net 3.5, .Net 3.0 and .Net 2.0. I was then finally able to install .Net 3.5 SP1 which thankfully is cumulative.

Optimistically I thought that would be the end of the issue but SharePoint seemed to be very broken. For example if I tried to navigate to the root of a site collection I’d get a 404 error. If I navigated to the full URL using /pages/default.aspx the site would load but images called from a document library were missing. If I accessed pages under /_layouts such as settings.aspx then everything loaded just fine.

The Windows Event logs were empty and since SharePoint Central Administration was exhibiting the same behaviour I ran the SharePoint Config Wizard. Once this completed CA was fine but I still had problems with the other Webapps and Site Collections.

At this point I resorted to trawling Google and perhaps for the first time in my career found the solution on Experts Exchange.

Open IIS Manager and for each Webapp navigate to Properties -> Home Directory -> Configuration -> Wildcard Application Maps.

If you’re experiencing the same problem as I did you’ll see that this is box is empty. Click on insert and add C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll.

Ensure that the check box “Verify that the file exists” is unchecked and click on Ok. After running IISRESET everything was working again and the problem was resolved.

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This weekend I joined the Netbook crowd with the purchase of a HP Mini-Note 2133. It was just under £200 from PC World. This particular Netbook has been largely ignored due to the comparatively poor processor and poor choice of OS namely SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition (SLED).

I don’t really care about the processor speed, what I care about is the superb screen. The 2133 is the only Netbook I’m aware of that can do 1280 x 768, which for me is the ideal resolution for such a small device, other Netbook’s with their pitiful 1024×576 resolution just don’t cut it.

Oh and being a HP Netbook the keyboard, speakers, track pad and smart aluminium chassis are all well made and of a high quality.

Now I hate SLED, it’s slow, has bad package management and poor usability, it had to go. This brings me to the second reason for purchasing this laptop, the 120gb hard disk, no tiny 8gb SSD for me! I’ve carved this up into three partitions; one for Windows 7 (which runs surprisingly well) , one for data and one for Ubuntu Linux.

I installed Windows 7 from an 8gb USB stick, it took less than an hour. To my amazement after running Windows update everything worked! The only thing that needed tweaking was the sound card which wouldn’t detect the headphones when they were plugged in. I installed the Vista sound card driver from HPs website which cured the problem.

Next comes the Ubuntu install which I’m sure won’t be anywhere near as straightforward. I’ve already read about numerous problems, although all of them seem to have solutions.

All in all I’m really pleased, although I’m already considering upgrading the memory from 1gb to 2gb, well it’s only another twenty quid.

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Ian Davis excellent presentation from code4lib serves as a timely reminder of what the Semantic Web is, and why it’s important.

It has just the right amount of Buzz Words - The Network Effect, Walled Gardens, Blue Oceans and Islands of data all get a mention.

I used to work at Talis and they’ve been banging on about this sort of stuff for years. And who can blame them? It’s difficult to be dismissive of a project backed by the inventor of the World Wide Web.

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How to transfer the logins and the passwords between instances of SQL Server 2005.

On Source Server
Create stored procedure sp_help_revlogin from code on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918992/.
Run the stored procedure and copy the output.

On Destination Server
Paste the Output from source server into a query window and run it.

Job done!

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To export all the Service Principle Names (SPNs) from a domain use

ldifde -f spns.txt -d DC=resource,DC=domain,DC=local -l serviceprincipalname

LDIFDE queries any available domain controller to retrieve/update AD information.

More information about LDIFDE can be found here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555634

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Late last week I attended a SQL 2008 Partner Technology Day.

Here are some brief notes on some of the features that stood out.

• Resource Governor – Allows you to ring fence workload execution for example you can give user X 20% of CPU and 256mb memory. The presenter actually demo’d this and showed changing a users resources on the fly. Powerful stuff.
• Backup Compression – Improved network throughput for Database Mirroring and Log Shipping though at the cost of CPU usage.
• FILESTREAM – You can now store blobs on an NTFS file system rather than in the database – overcomes some of the performance problems with storing Binary Data.
• Clustering – You can now have sixteen nodes per cluster (up from 8). Also chained setup and Rolling upgrades make installation and maintenance a lot easier.
• Apparently there are no plans for a Load Balancing solution which is a bummer – you still have to rely on 3rd party apps.
• Oh and Management Studio now has IntelliSense which is cool.

Useful Resource Govenor Resources.

CSS SQL Server Engineers - Resource Governor Questions:
http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/01/10/sql-server-2008-resource-governor-questions.aspx

Technet on Resource Governor
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933866.aspx

Technet on limiting CPU for a compressed backup
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280384.aspx

Troubleshooting Resource Governor
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc627395.aspx

Resource Governor Demo
http://blogs.technet.com/sqlos/archive/2007/12/14/part-1-anatomy-of-sql-server-2008-resource-governor-cpu-demo.aspx

Useful High Availability Resources

How to: Create a New SQL Server Failover Cluster (Setup)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179530(SQL.100).aspx

How to: Add or Remove Nodes in a SQL Server Failover Cluster (Setup)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191545(SQL.100).aspx

Windows Server 2008 High Availability
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/high-availability.aspx

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Oh, the wonders of selinux.

To allow Apache to make remote connections to, for example, MySQL, POP or IMAP services type the following as root or using sudo;

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect=1

To temporarily disable selinux (not recommeded) type;

echo 0 >/selinux/enforce

Use

echo 1 >/selinux/enforce

to enable.

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Type the following command at the command prompt:

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set /w3svc/<site identifier>/SecureBindings ":443:<host header>"

where host header is the host header for the Web site.

Shamelessly lifted from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc756897.aspx

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Here are my 2009 tech based new years resolutions.

1. Play more with social media. Dip into Twitter a couple of times a day, try to blog once a week and keep an eye on the web 2.0 (3.0!?) news sites - Having said that I’m still not sure I ‘get’ Twitter but hundreds of thousands of people can’t be wrong (surely?), I’m willing to give it another go and have added a bunch of new people.
2. Learn PowerShell properly, stop falling back on VBScript or horror of horrors batch files.
3. Get certified in Windows 2008 and associated technologies (possibly SQL Server 2008 and MOSS).
4. Learn C#, stop hacking about with other peoples code and write some of my own. Focus on SharePoint development.
5. Play more Computer Games. Last year I played maybe 2 hours a week of PES and dabbled with various first person shooters. I got Far Cry 2 for Christmas and played though about 65%, I’ll try to play it till the end and not get distracted like I did with Bioshock, Gears of War and Stalker. I’ve completed Crysis and Crysis Warhead but they don’t count as they’re so much better than any game I’ve played since Half-life 2.
6. Don’t forget Linux and Open Source - Just because I work for a Microsoft Gold Partner doesn’t mean I should forget five plus years of *nix skills.
7. Revist this list in twelve months time and dispair at how few have been achieved

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