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.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
[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.
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.
"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.
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