Ben There, Done That

Well, I had to make a tough decision last week. After nearly two wonderful years at BlueGranite I’m moving on to a new career with EPC Group. I will be starting my responsibilities with them as a Sr. SharePoint Consultant in the coming weeks as I wrap up my projects with BlueGranite and begin work on my projects with EPC. As of right now my SharePoint blog will remain here, but if it changes I will let all of you know if I move my blog. It has been a wonderful couple of years at BlueGranite and I have learned a lot while there. I am now looking excitedly towards starting full time work with EPC and delving even more into SharePoint and working on projects with the team over at EPC Group!

I have some disappointing news. I was unable to get my alert issues and PerformancePoint issues worked out before I ran out of time. I gave it a go after the last couple days, but was unable to fix the issues. I found what appear to be some of the issues within the database, but wasn’t able to get the tables rearranged correctly to get it all working. I gave it a good try on Friday, but due to time constraints I had to resort to disconnecting from my server farm, creating a new farm, and re-attaching all my content databases. I hope to rebuild an environment where I can give this another try soon. I’ll keep the updates going about my progress on this issue and if anyone else has any pointers or tricks that I have missed and can add to my work on this, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll make sure it gets included.

I’m sorry again that I don’t have better news after all this workL

I needed one more post after working more with my SQL move. As I went through the move Alerts were continuing to work fine. However, as or right now, my Alerts have quit working and I haven’t been able to get them working again. The only other thing I’ve had a problem with is that PerformancePoint Configuration Wizard isn’t recognizing that SharePoint has been installed/configured. As a result, be careful when following Parts 1 and 2 and PPS and Alerts may quit working. Once I fix these problems I’ll post further updates to the Database move. Sorry that I didn’t realize this problems earlier. I’ll keep you all updated…

Sorry Part 2 has taken a little while in coming, I spent the last few days with my girlfriend and driving from MI down to FL. Anyways, you probably don’t care about that, you just want to know what I did to move the rest of my databases, so here it goes.

After moving all your content databases over, the next thing to do is to move the config database. Microsoft actually provides a pretty straight forward way to do this. Start by taking a backup of your SharePoint config database and restoring it to your new SQL Server. Once it is restored there you can run stsadm –o setconfigdb. The flags that you can set along with this command allow you to set your newly moved Database as the new config database. This is where the fun starts. Many of you have done this and then reported that you still get errors about access the old SQL Server. A co-worker and I decided to dig into this a little more and found that in Central Admin under Operations -> Servers in Farm, it showed our old SQL Server as having the configuration databases, even though it was completely removed.

This is where the dive into the SharePoint Databases began. I opened up the SharePoint Configuration Databases and started digging and quickly discover a couple of tables that I could change a few rows in and solve all my problems. The first of these was dbo.Objects and the second dbo.Dependancies. In my objects table I still had an entry for my old SQL Server and a GUID tied to that Server. I took the GUID from my old SQL Server and did a query to find what it was the parent of and discovered it was the parent of the databases instance (which has a blank name if you are using the default instance). I took the GUID of the SQL instance, did a query and found that in this database, it was still the parent ID for my Config databases!! I had a good backup of my database so I figured what the heck, let’s change this. So, I found the GUID for the instance of my new SQL Server, and executed an update query to change the ParentID GUID of my configuration database to the GUID that matched my new SQL Instance. I then ventured back in Central Admin and found to my excitement, that the Configuration Server listed about in my Servers in Farm was now changed to my new SQL Server. So far so good…but then I looked at my event log.

Still getting errors, so I thought maybe it was because my original SQL Server was still in my Server list in Operations -> Servers in Farm. I tried to remove it, but receive an error from SharePoint about dependencies…another table in my SQL Database. I decided to take a look and see in here. I found by executing queries on the database that there were still dependencies on my old SQL Server, particularly for different things relating to Alerts. Again, I had a backup, so I changed everything in my dependencies table by executing an update query that replace any GUID referencing my old SQL instance with a reference to my new SQL instance. I was still getting errors when trying to remove the SQL server and it dawned on me, that all my SharedServices databases were still listed as having a ParentID of my old SQL Server in my objects table. So, I went back to my SQL Server, did a backup and restore of all my SharedServices databases to my new Server, opened up another query windows and this time updated the ParentID of all the SharedServices databases in my objects table to the GUID for my new SQL Server. After an IIS reset, just to make sure, everything was still working!! Every reference in SharedServices was to my new SQL Server, all my databases were offline on my old SQL Server and everything worked!! I checked my error log and was still getting a few random errors. I restarted the server just to clear anything that had gotten cached somehow before I went any further.

That did it! After the reboot ALL my SharePoint errors in the event log were gone and everything seemed to be running! I had successfully moved over all my SharePoint databases, not lost any information and wasn’t receiving any errors. Unfortunately, in the few days that have followed, I’ve found a few minor problems I’m still trying to work out and figure out if they are related to the move or not. The first is that PerformancePoint doesn’t recognize SharePoint as being configured when trying to install the WebParts for PPS. The second is that there seems to be weird permissions issue with IIS as any site on my SharePoint server that isn’t anonymous access, NTLM or Kerberos prompts for a username and password, but won’t accept even an admin password. This is happening with my Forms Authentication site as well as with a generic .NET site running on the server. If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them and I’ll keep you updated on what I find.

I’m sorry this is a longer post, but hopefully you will all find this helpful and worth the longer post.

Here it is! Finally, a “How-To” for moving EVERY SharePoint database to a new server without losing any data. Unfortunately, due to the time of night and a last permission glitch I want to work through, I won’t have the complete instructions in this post, but I’ll give you a little teaser, and don’t worry, the details are close behind.

The first step is to move all the content databases to the new server. This can be done through Central Admin and using stsadm. The first step is to prepare the database to move using stsadm -o prepartetomove. After this, all you need to do is navigate to Central Admin -> Application Management -> Content Databases. From here select a web application, remove the databases, open up SQL Server, backup the database, restore the database to the new server, and then use stsadm –o addcontentdb on the SharePoint server to attach the database back to the web application. Continue to do this for all the web applications in your server farm.

This will also work for your Central Admin content database. For a step-by-step on moving Content Databases, including the Central Admin, see this blog post by Rickey Whitworth.

After this is where the problems start to arise, usually in moving the configuration database, the Search database, and the SharedServices Database(s). I’ll go into this in more detail in the next post, but it involves, more stsadm, running Configuration Wizard, resetting the search service and manually modifying the Objects Table and the Dependencies table in your SharePoint Configuration Database. Most people have commented that after moving the SharePoint Configuration Database using stsadm –o setcontentdb they get continual errors in the Event log along the lines of the one below. The method I will describe in the next post got rid of this error for me and left me with a running SharePoint environment.

Event Type:    Error

Event Source:    Windows SharePoint Services 3

Event Category:    Database

Event ID:    3760

Date:        3/11/2008

Time:        5:05:00 PM

User:        N/A

Computer:    [SharePoint Server]

Description:

SQL Database ‘SharePoint_Config’ on SQL Server instance ‘[OldServer]‘ not found. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.

Cannot open database SharePoint_Config” requested by the login. The login failed.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I saw a blog posting about Microsoft Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint the other day and decided to check out the site. I was disappointed to find that there were some cool samples up there; however none were available for download. Well, I’m happy to announce that I just visited the site to see if there were any changes and all 6 samples are now available! They have some really cool stuff up there including a Picture Viewer, A custom field type, Navigation controls and a few other Silverlight samples for SharePoint. Go check it out and hopefully this site will continue to grow as both SharePoint and Silverlight grow in popularity.

Beta 1 of IE8 has been released and can be downloaded here. I just finished downloading it and installing it on my computer and have already hit my first snag. Apparently Office Live Workspace Beta, which was released worldwide yesterday (and I happened to blog about yesterday as well) doesn’t work with IE8 yet. I get the following error when trying to access my workspace:

To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later, running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2003. You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer from the Windows Internet Explorer page.
   
• Firefox 2.0, running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox 2.0 from the Firefox Download page.

One nice feature about the beta is the button right on the toolbar to Emulate IE7. It forces you to close and reopen your browser to switch modes, but once switched, everything works just like it did in IE7. It’s a nice way to try out IE8 without having to fully commit to it and be able to switch back to IE7 mode if a website isn’t working or rendering properly.

I just ran across a new website (still in Beta) called UltimatePC. If you are running Windows Vista Ultimate it has some nifty features from great deals on hardware and software for people running Vista Ultimate to some blueprints for various environments you can set up around the house. The website and the resources on there can be accessed from any operating system; however, the special deals are only for those people running Vista Ultimate. If you get the chance, go check it out.

If you’re like me, you may be asking, “Microsoft SharedView, what is that?”. I found out about it today through my Office Live Workspace. I clicked on the Share button and was present with Share Workspace and Share screen. Sharing a workspace I was familiar with, but this sharing a screen peaked my curiosity, so I clicked on it. I was taken the Microsoft SharedView Beta download site. So, being the kind of person I am, I decided to download it and install it.

After it downloaded an installed, a toolbar showed up at the top of my screen and I thought to myself, this looks a lot like Windows Live Meeting. I had the option to start a new session, so I quickly started a session and was given my session information. I immediately sent the info to a co-worker, he clicked on the link and was prompted to install Microsoft SharedView. Once he installed it, he joined my meeting and I was asked if I want to let him in. I clicked yes, and sure enough, we found ourselves in a free, simplified version of Office Live Meeting 2007 with the ability to share a screen or just an application, give each other control of the meeting and message each other in the meeting. It was impressive.

The response time seemed a little slow, so we’ll continue to play with it and see how it goes, but it is a great option if you need a free tool to host internet wide web meetings with friends, classmates, co-workers or family members. I know I’ll use it as well if only to help troubleshoot family and friends computers as it is a quick easy way for me to see what they see as well as gain control of their mouse and keyboard if necessary to help them out. Way to go Microsoft! In my opinion your starting to compete with some of the Google web applications and I’m loving the progress and steps you are taking to compete.