Karthik's SharePoint Blog

So you are building a SharePoint farm and your doing several tasks not in a particular order. You created a bunch of site collections, you worked on some UI customizations and you realized you haven't provisioned mysite, so you try to configure your SSP. At this point the Create SSP page times out with an error "Timer Job could not be completed and it will be re-tried after some time".

At some point your WFE server's timer job definitions went out of synch from your config DB. This is one of the root causes for lot of issues related to timer jobs. So once again clearing the file system cache come to the rescue!

Steps to Clear the File System Cache

Follow the instructions from the link above and wait for couple of hours. Go to your SSP Admin page, SSP will appear automatically because your server promised that it will re-try the timer job at a regular interval until it completes successfully.

Posted by Karthik Murugesan at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reseting the file system cache have resolved many issues I had in my SharePoint farm. Microsoft tech support gave me this resolution to fix some issues I had with Usage Analysis. I perform this operation fisrt if I get stuck with any issues related to timer jobs. Good times!

So, how to clear the file system cache?

File system cache should be cleared on all servers in the server farm on which the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service is running. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Stop the Timer service.
To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
b. Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Stop.
 
2. Delete or move the contents of the following folder:
a. %ALLUSERSPROFILE% \Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID
b. Leave the cache.ini alone
c. Delete all other files (all guid.xml) these are all timer job definitions
d. Open cache.ini in notepad and change whatever number you see there to 0

3. Start the Timer service:
To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
b. Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Start.
 
Note: The file system cache is re-created after you perform this procedure. Make sure that you perform this procedure on all servers in the server farm on which the Timer service is running.

Go back to the %ALLUSERSPROFILE% \Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID folder and make sure you see a bunch of xml files.

Open the cache.ini and see if the 0 is replaced by a higher value.

You have just synched all your servers with the same timer job definitions from the config db.

Posted by Karthik Murugesan at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day I was trying to enable the Document Conversion on my SharePoint farm and had some issues. After some research I found two different different articles that helped me fix this issue. You might encounter any one of the following issue. I encountered the second one. And I've explained the steps involved by combining the steps from these two different articles, in order.

Issue 1: Document Conversions Launcher Service is always in "starting" state (specifically when trying to enable the Launcher Service on more than one Server in the farm). The Document Conversions Launcher Service Admin UI is not functional for any Launcher that will run on a server that is not hosting the Central Administration web application. The UI will never reflect current state in this configuration.

Issue 2: You might get DCLauncher error at Microsoft.SharePoint.Win32.SPAdvApi32.SetServiceStartupType

Follow the steps to resolve these issues.

Step 1: Start the load balancing service in your application server and make a note of the port#.

Step 2: To enable the Launcher Service you must specify the necessary Launcher information that the UI normally provides. This is done by updating two values in a registry key located on the machine on which you are trying to run the Launcher service. This includes the location of the Load Balancer and the Port to use for the connection.

Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings]"LoadBalancerUrl"="http://server:port/HtmlTrLoadBalancer""Port"=dword:port

LoadBalancerUrl: This is the full URL to the .NET Remoting channel that the Load Balancer opens. The scheme should be http://[please specify Load Balancer server]:[please specify Load Balancer port]/HtmlTrLoadBalancer and ensure they are accurate.

Port: This is the port that the launcher service will open for incoming .NET Remoting requests to do Conversions, e.g. "8082".

Step 3: After changing either of these settings (initially or if future machines are added and require settings changes), you must stop and start the Launcher service (Office Document Conversions Launcher Service) in the Services control panel (Start|Control Panel|Administrative Tools|Services). The services should be set to Enabled and set to start automatically (Automatic) if not so already. Any future changes to the Load Balancer settings will require updating the Launcher settings on each machine to reflect those changes. The services will also have to be stopped and then started again to pick up the new changes once updated.

If you continue to get the same issue, try restarting the service using STSADM utility.

Stop the Document Conversions Launcher Service

Start the Document Conversions Launcher Service

Posted by Karthik Murugesan at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (6)

Finally Microsoft has released it's long awaited version of BDC editor. Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor comes as a part of the recent release of SharePoint Server 2007 Software Development Kit and can be downloaded here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&displaylang=en. After the SDK is installed, navigate to SDK Install Location\Tools\BDC Definition Editor\readme.html.

To install the Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool:

• By default, the SDK install location is C:\Program Files\2007 Office System Developer Resources\
• The setup program for the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor is located in the following path: C:\Program Files\2007 Office System Developer Resources\TOOLS\BDC Definition Editor\
• To install the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor, double-click setup.exe in that folder

Posted by Karthik Murugesan at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is a list of SharePoint/ASP.net resource sites.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint
• http://www.sharepointsecurity.com/blog
• http://geekswithblog.net
• http://devcow.com
• http://sharepoint123.com
• http://www.atlantacodecamp.com

Posted by Karthik Murugesan at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)