Important notice

Please note that this blog is discontinued here. All the posts are also coppied to my new blog at http://boris.gomiunik.net.
Important: Due to large amount of comment spam further commenting has been disabled here. If you wish to send me a comment, plase look up the same post on my new blog and leave comment there. Thanks!

6/20/2007

Remote desktop from Windows Vista slow or not working?

I use a lot of remote desktop to manage access to clients or servers. But after installing Windows Vista on my computer, this has been virtually impossible. When I tried to remotely connect it got the connection, but it slowed down or completely froze so it wasn't possible to even log on.

Finally I've found a solution for the slow remote desktop problem here.

It was needed to run the command prompt as administrator and disable auto tuning for the TCP/IP receive window. If you're having the same problem use command

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

To reenable it enter

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

And remote desktop magically started working!

6/11/2007

Reinstalling SharePoint (WSS3) to run under SQL server 2005 instead of Windows internal database (##SSEE)

Recently I was fixing on one server an installation of Windows SharePoint Services that has gone wrong. Even though we've had SQL server 2005 installed correctly, WSS3 installed its own Windows internal database (##SSEE) and started using it. I thouhght a simple uninstall and reinstall of WSS would do the trick. But it didn't. After uninstalling and trying to reinstall WSS3 at the beginning didn't even offer the option to configure it to SQL server (the step in WSS configuration where is asking you which is the location of configuration database,...).

After a couple of retries (also uninstalling SSEE and a lot of reading on the web to my horror I've found one sentence "you'll need a clean install of Windows Server 2003."

.

This was a bit tough because of existing users and some other parameters. After digging a bit deeper and combining knowlege of couple of experts' blogs I've managed to successfully reinstall WSS3 without Windows Internal Database (SSEE) and into SQL server 2005.

Before I write how I did it, let me clear that this solution worked for me. I'm presuming that you don't have anything else installed in SSEE and I'm not responsible for any errors that might happen if you're following the same procedure. So please before making anything on a production server - backup, backup, backup. This procedure includes messing with Windows registry!

Here goes:

1. Copy all the SharePoint Sites to another temporary folder
Using
 
stsadm -o backup -url http://<site_collection_url> -filename <location and filename>

 
copying backup files to new server and
 
stsadm -o restore -url http://<site_collection_url> -filename <location and filename>

 
on the temporary server worked the best. It kept all the relations and all the custom formatting on all the sites.

2. If these are productions sites modify DNS or forwarding to point to the temporary server

3. Here's where the "fun" begins: Delete all the SharePoint Web applications

4. Uninstall Windows SharePoint Services through Control Panel

5. Uninstall Windows internal database (##SSEE)
Connex' Copper Coins has it described in his blog here. Just in case I'm writing a short ressume:

Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall click different GUIDs untill in the right pane you see under "Display name" Microsoft SQL 2005 Embedded Edition". Under that registry copy the value under "UninstallString". Run the command prompt window, paste the command AND add "CALLERID=OCSETUP" at the end of commend line. For example: MsiExec.exe /X{BDD79957-5801-4A2D-B09E-852E7FA64D01} CALLERID=OCSETUP.EXE.

(ressumed from Connex' Copper Coins)

6- Delete all files and folders under %windir%\SYSMSI\SSEE

7. delete all and folders files under %Programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12

8. Using reged backup and delete in registry everything under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\

9. The previous step also deleted the "Server language" entry. so Using notepad create a .reg file with the following text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\ServerLanguage]
"1033"=""

and run it to restore the "Server Language" entry needed for Windows SharePoint Services installation.

With that I have removed every trace (or at least enough) of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 from the server. Now I was able to re-run the WSS 3 setup and and it offered me the option for nstalling it into SQL server 2005 and without SSEE.

This is how you can have it done without making a clean install of Windows Server 2003.


If you need help installing WSS, I recommend the following article on technet:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/6181fe5b-90ca-40cf-aade-abd59cf3c9071033.mspx?mfr=true

6/06/2007

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 available

I'm already using it to write all my posts for this blog. It has many improvements and features, so I recommend it. Amongst many others, one of them is also the support for blogger tags. You can download it from Windows Live writer website, but the link is misleading. Don't click on the big Download button, because it will lead you to the Live Betas web page.

 To download Windows Live writer, click on the links in the left bar. Click here to go to Windows Live Writer

Click here to go to the page and download Windows Live Writer beta 2

More options for creating a favicon

In my past post about creating favicon online nicolas sent me a comment with a link to another good tool for creating favicons. It's a favicon generator from images. All you need to do is to upload 16x16 or 32x32 .gif or .png file and it will generate the favicon for you. You can find this tool on Web Script lab.

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If you have Paint.net, you can also download a plugin that will save your image like a favicon - so you can make your favicon also offline.

There are many options also online if you don't want to make your favicon. One is to search for them. I've also found one favicon gallery.

 

All this talk about favicon. And how to insert the favicon? If you have a favicon file named favicon.ico in the same folder that the web page you're trying to add it to, in the head if the page add the following line of code:

<link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

6/04/2007

Application pool for each SharePoint (WSS) site?

After a long time I'm returning with some SharePoint administration and deployment topics.

One of them is Web application pools with SharePoint. When creating more top level sites with each its own application pool, you can seriously think about how this will affect the server performance.

With around 50 SharePoint sites (and app pools) running we've increased the page file from 1 GB to almost 4 GB.

So planning here is very important. Think about how many web applications you'll need. If you'll need many, think about grouping web applications to application pools.

The difference in performance is very obvious.

If anyone has similar experience, I'll be more than happy to read about it in the comments to this post. :)