[MOSS/WSSv3] Error "Unable to get the private bytes memory limit for the W3WP process."

[ISSUE]
On the environment of a customer we encountered a lot of errors in the event log, which also caused some performance issues. The message was:
"Unable to get the private bytes memory limit for the W3WP process. The ASP.NET cache will be unable to limit its memory use, which may lead to a process restart. Error 0x80070005".

[CAUSE]
The message is caused by a known issue with insufficient permissions in your IIS metabase. The metabase ACL's on the target server did not include the IIS_WPG group on the following two nodes of the metabase (IIS_WPG is in both ACL's on a clean install):
- W3SVC/AppPools
- W3SVC/Filters

[SOLUTION]
Download the MetaACL utility from KB267904. When you have downloaded and installed the program, run the vbs via the following command:

cscript metaacl.vbs IIS://Localhost/W3SVC/AppPools IIS_WPG RE

The path is case sensitive - type exactly as above; after you run this command restart the IIS services and see if this corrects the problem.

Source

[MOSS/WSSv3] Large log files with default logging options

[ISSUE]
When you configured the SharePoint logging as default, it is very much possible that the logs are filled with "Preserving template record with id....." messages. You would expect these messages only to be logged when logging is set to Verbose mode.

[SOLUTION]
The question how to solve this issue has been asked a lot on the Internet, for example on the MS Forums. Unfortunately nobody had a real answer. But since a couple of months, Microsoft fixed this issue. The April Cumulative Update now contains a fix for this issue:

When you set the least critical event to report in the Event log to ERROR, and you set the least critical event to report to the trace log to MEDIUM, the following messages are logged in the Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs:
Preserving template record with size…
Deleting template record with size…
However, you only expect these ULS messages to appear if the logging level for General is set to Verbose.

Just install this update and you are good to go!!

[MOSS2007] Issues with Excel Services

[ISSUE]
Over the past weeks, we have had some issue with the amount of available disk space on our C drive. In order to free up some data, I have created a script which deleted used data from the C drive. One of the items it cleaned was the C:\Windows\Temp folder. After we ran the script on our servers, Excel Services suddenly stopped functioning properly.

[CAUSE]
As it turned out, Excel Services is writing some files into the C:\Windows\Temp folder on de Excel Services servers. After running the script, these folder were deleted, messing up Excel Services.

[SOLUTION]
From within the Shared Services page (Excel Services Settings section > Edit Excel Services Settings > Workbook Cache Location), you can change the location to which Excel Services writes these temp files. When leaving empty, it will use the system Temp folder.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The application pool account needs to have write permissions to this folder. And an iisreset is required before the changed setting will be activated.

[MOSS/WSSv3] June 09 Cumulative Update released

The June 09 Cumulative Update has been released. You can find more information about them on the following links:

MOSS:
972569 Global
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;972569

970948 Global
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;970948

970947 Language specific
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;970947

972562 Language specific
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;972562

WSS:
971538 uber package
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;971538

This update contains hotfixes after April CU and Microsoft recommends to install according to the following sequence:

• Install SP2 for WSS and MOSS SP2 and Language Packs
• Install the MOSS Trial hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620/en-us
• Install the uber package for WSS http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=971538&kbln=en-us
• Install MOSS fixes on demand or wait for the uber package for MOSS because that is not yet available due to Microsoft Project 2007 dependencies. It is expected that the MOSS uber package also contains the trial fix.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/joerg_sinemus/archive/2009/07/01/moss-and-wss-june-cu.aspx

[Citrix WISP] The Web Interface for SharePoint shows "No Resources"

[ISSUE]
I tried to install the Citrix Web Interface for SharePoint 2007 (WISP) on our SharePoint environment according to the installation manual supplied by Citrix.

After the installation and configuration, the WISP only showed "No Resources" instead of any applications.

[CAUSE]
According to this article is one of the features supposed to create an application in IIS in the web application where you activated that specific feature. Unfortunately it did not do that. We are using Windows 2008 and IIS7, so maybe that is the cause of this issue.

[SOLUTION]
To solve this issue, I created the application in IIS manually. Just take the following steps:

• Browse to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\Citrix folder
• There should be a folder with a GUID as its name, copy that name
• Open IIS and browse to your web application
• Create a new application and use the GUID as the name and the same application pool as the web application

The downside of this issue is that you need to perform this step on each of your web servers manually.

[MOSS/WSSv3] Common mistake about SharePoint recycle bin

Up until recently I was under the impression (like may others with me) that the timeframe you can configure for the recycle bin in the Central Administration page was for the first stage only. When that period was expired, SharePoint would move the content to the second stage recycle bin.

Last week I have been talking with a Microsoft employee who told me something different. According to him, SharePoint deletes the items from the recycle bin after this period, both from the first AND second stage recycle bin. The only way documents get specifically moved to the second stage is when a users cleans his recycle bin.

[MOSS/WSSv3] Bug in STSADM MergeContentDBS command

With Service Pack 1, Microsoft introduced the STSAdm command "Mergecontentdbs". With this command you can move site collections between databases. Unfortunately I recently ran into a bug in this command:

When your site collection contains multi valued columns, it is possible that the data in these columns will be gone after migration.

This issue is confirmed by Microsoft and according to them fixed in the April Cumulative Update. To prevent this issue from occuring, install Service Pack 2 and the April Cumulative Update on your environment.

[MOSS2007] Unexplainable errors on the server desktop

[ISSUE]
A while ago we received some unexplainable errors on the servers desktop. A popup window would appear with the Title "Error" and three buttons "Abort, Retry and Ignore". That was all the info we got. When the popup was shown, IIS stopped responding all together until one of the buttons was clicked.

We had to call in the assistance of Microsoft and after numerous troubleshooting sessions we tracked down the issue to the Search component of SharePoint.

[CAUSE]
A user has uploaded a picture of himself to a picture library. He wanted to use that picture as his profile picture, so he copied the URL of the page (not of the picture) and managed to somehow paste this into the ProfilePicture URL field.

Unfortunately the picture library had spaces in the URL and when opening a picture, SharePoint always places the location where the user came from in the URL. Because the library contains spaces, were these URL double encoded:
Space: %20
Percentage sign: %25
Double encoded space: %2520




This caused the user to paste a double encoded URL into his ProfilePicture field. As it turns out, SharePoint throws an assertion error when it is requested to return this value, for example when searching for that specific person.

[RESOLUTION]
After discovering the issue, the Microsoft engineers checked internally and found out that coincidentally the issue was fixed in MOSS Service Pack 2. They redesigned the assertion handling in this service pack, fixing the issue.

Before we implemented Service Pack 2 on our environment, we changed the value is the users profile to a correct value and ran another crawl. Fortunately we never saw the issue ever again.

[WSSv3\MOSS] Shortcoming in stsadm MergeContentDbs - does not support multiple SQL instances

In our environment we have multiple SQL instances that host the content databases. Just tried to copy a site collection from one content database on one SQL instance to another content database on a different SQL instance. Unfortunately I got the following message:

"The databases need to be on the same database server in order to combine them"

It looks like the command does not support multiple SQL instances, which would be a real shortcoming.

Move IIS 7 root directory to different drive in Windows 2008

In IIS6, it was possible to specify the directory in which IIS should place its files during installation. In IIS7, this is not possible anymore.

To solve this issue, you can download a script which is able to do this after installation on this page:
http://blogs.iis.net/thomad/archive/2008/02/10/moving-the-iis7-inetpub-directory-to-a-different-drive.aspx

The script only contains a small bug. Solve this by:

• Search and replace "f:\" by "%MOVETO%"