Psychology Technology

Today after successfully testing the February Cumulative updates for WSS and Office Server 2007 (KB978395 and KB978396), I went to apply these in the production environment.  Somewhat to my suprise, when starting the updates, a message read that:

“There are no products affected by this package installed on this system.”

Well then!  What I forgot to take in to account, is that my VM testing was done on the 32 bit platform, whereas our production environment is x64.  Downloading the correct platform updates from the same KB article will get things going for you.

Recently in a locked down environment, it was reported that the search service would not start.  This was preventing an application-based backup of the Project Server farm.

The Application Event log error was Event ID 10029, and reads:

Error backing up registry hive to the configuration database.

The reason this occured is because Group Policy was preventing access to the registry (and/or command line) despite the account having the necessary Local Administrator permissions.  We confirmed this was the case by using RunAs… and trying to start registry editor, which gave a nice message stating this was not allowed.

The resolution obviously, is to move the search service account in to a less restrictive Group Policy, or mark an explicit allow on the local machine GP as that should take precedence over any Domain Group Policy.

our environment started to have errors after a cluster failover and SQL hotfix applied to 9.0.4053

When starting the search service from within Central Administration, Operations, Services on Server, Search, we got errors like: 

Databases must be empty before they can be used.  Delete all of the tables, stored procedures and other objects or use a different database.

and

‘databaseName’ is not empty and does not match current database schema

Luckily this was not a content database, and living without search for a short while is tolerable in the environment.  The first attempt to resolve was to fail the cluster back over (though that was upgraded as well) but the issue persisted.  Second, I performed a Point In Time recovery on the search database, though that proved to not help.  Lastly, with success, I dropped the existing Search Database (you may have to stop the Search Service in services.msc or kill any open connections), created a new blank database, and the service started no problem.

Recently I moved an installation of Neevia’s Document Convertor Pro to a new machine, as well as moving from version 4.9.9 to 5.2.2

Everything eventually migrated without much issue, though the main stumbling block (as it always does) proved to be antivirus software getting in the way of normal operation.  Once the antivirus realtime scanning was reduced in scope, all the document parsers to convert to pdf seemed well.

One small mistep was that one of the folders I set up for monitoring was not keeping the orientation of pages.  There were several documents where the first page was portrait, and the remaining were landscape.  This was easily overcome by going in to the folder settings, and making the AutoRotate Pages option set to ‘Page-by-Page’ instead of default.  While there is probably some performance overhead to this, it is needed for some environments.

Also, the support Neevia provide is fantastic!

To add a template, change the requisite lines (disclaimer use at your own risk! I accept no liability for your actions)

@echo off
@echo Installing sharepoint templates…
“%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin\STSADM.exe” -o AddTemplate -Filename CustomTemplateFile.stp -Title “Unique title of this Template”
@echo Templates have been installed unless there have been error messages.
@echo Restarting IIS to enable templates
iisreset /noforce
@echo Templates installed and available.
pause

To remove a template, you could do something similar below:

@echo off
@echo Uninstalling sharepoint templates…
“%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin\STSADM.exe” -o DeleteTemplate -Title “Unique Title of Template”
@echo Templates have been uninstalled.
@echo Restarting IIS to remove templates
iisreset /noforce
@echo Templates uninstalled and removed.
pause

–You can confirm which templates are installed by using the following command:

“%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin\STSADM.exe” -o enumTemplates