My Sharepoint Musings

Because of various factors, i was forced to make my sharepoint site use basic authentication instead of NTLM, Kerbrose, or any other auth system. This had to do with our novel environment, and a number of user problems, mostly people forgetting to use our domain/username format to log into sharepoint. After reconfiguring everything to use the basic authentication method, i ran into a problem with sharepoint search and it's Default content access account. Namely, you can not tell sharepoint search to not try to log in using the default access account with out the domain infront of it's name. The solution i found on the web was to create a crawl rule for your site, (ex: http://intranet/*) and specify a different content access account for it, and then uncheck "Do not allow Basic Authentication". Problem with this is that in order for sharepoint to search the sites at all, it forced me to check (set) "Crawl SharePoint content as Http pages." That is a problem b...

Here's the situation: I deployed a demo version of a sharepoint webpart as a solution to my webserver before i deployed the full version. So i deploy it, added it to a webpage and tried it out. Afterwards i removed it from the webpage, and deactivated the solution, then retracted the solution. Now is where the trouble came in at: I went to go deploy the full version of it and i got a "dll is in use error". All attempts to remove this dll i got errors, and crashed the server a few times during the proccess as well. Fun stuff. The solution: The solution is remarkably simple that most people will look right over it: Go to the webpart galery for the site(s) you used the webpart on, and remove it from the gallery. After doing this (and making sure it wasn't on any of the other pages on the site) deploying the package went through with out a problem. Wish this was documented better (and the solution providor knew about it more).

For various reasons i wont go into it is pretty clear to me that the people who originally set up the search server had never restarted it.. ever. I am having some trouble getting search to function correctly, or even start back up normally after i restarted the search server. What oringally forced me to restart the server was during my morning browsing of the error logs on my servers, i noticed that the search server (MOSS) had no hard drive space left on it's c:\ drive. So after clearing out some *.log files and freeing up alot of space, i tried restarting the server. The error messages i get are as follow: Under Shared Services Administration> Search> Search settings The search service is currently offline. Visit the services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress. On the search server (Moss) event log: The database connection string is not available. Event Ty...

So i'v been battling looking for a solution to this problem all day, then it hit me. So i just made a new server for my moss install, replacing the old search server. And for the life of me after i installed sharepoint on the machine, i could not get through the configuration wizard, it just, would not, go, though! No matter what username and password i put in, it wouldn't work. Solution: I was signed in as the local administrator! You have to sign on a domain account that has access to the sql server for it to work correctly! DOH! go figure. Now if i can just fix this package solution problem with out having to resort to restarting my server.