Database is too old and upgrade is required – WSS_Search SharePoint 2007

You may get one of these errors in your Health Analyzer logs.  I am getting it on a database called WSS_Search_SVR-WEB1.  What happened was that I had two server in my farm, one of which I decommisioned to move to 64bit before moving to 2010.

The older SVR-WEB1 had the WSS Search database tied too it.  But somehow when I decommisioned it, the entry in the objects heirarchy table remained (it became orphaned and the 2010 upgrade checker didn't say jack about them) and now I'm stuck with this weird database that is really OLD and SharePoint 2010 does NOT like.  How do I remove it? 

As always, I left with resorting to the objects table and doing a 'name like' and 'properties like' query to find anything that was related to the old server.  Once I find those things i run the STSADM -o deleteconfigurationobject -id "<object id>" command to remove them.

After removing the orphaned objects, I re-run the Health Analyzer job and the error goes away!  Whoot!

Chris

Missing server side dependencies. – SharePoint 2010

This error is like a catch all of anything that could go wrong in your 2010 Farm, especially after upgrade!  There is a reason the 12 Hive is left over at the end of the upgrade.  You have stuff in it!  If you don't write a feature upgrade event for all your custom features before youdo the upgrade, your feature directories don't get copied over.  The majority of errors I have for this health Analyzer Rule is from this very fact.  All I had to do was to move the older features over to the new 14 hive features directory.  Then all was good!

You can also reference this older post about the other causes of this error here.

Chris

The Forum Jam 2010 Results and SharePoint MVP Challenge

The results are in and we have some outstanding individuals to identify!

First off, we all take our hats off to Clayton Cobb, InfoPath MVP should be SharePoint MVP.  He is a wealth of knowledge and supportive intelligence that deserves some serious recognition.  If you have not had the opportunity to work with Clayton and his company Planet Technologies, then you are missing out.  Clayton and his employees are the top dawgs in SharePoint in Colorado!

Second, Marc Anderson, the King of SharePoint JQuery knowledge out of Boston.  He can make End Users sing love and joy not seen since Woodstock when working with SharePoint and just using the SharePoint Data View and Content Query Web parts!  Although he is not a SharePoint MVP, I have not seen a reason why he is not one.  He has certainly contributed more than I have seen most SharePoint MVPs contribute in, well, let's be honest, EVER!

Thirdly, a fellow Oklahoman!  I am SUPER proud of Corey Roth.  He not only participated, but contributed the highest ratio of posts to answers of all qualified participants.  That just goes to show how bright and qualified us Oklahoman's are and how we are taking over everything! O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A where the wind comes sweeping down the planes….good job Corey!

My hats off to everyone that said they wanted to participate and put in the time to help on the forums, you are also above average in your willingness to help the community!

So with these stars currently shining brighter than any I have seen in a while, on behalf of every one that participated, I post this challege to the SharePoint MVP community.  See if you can do better.  Most of you will fail, few will succeed, but those who do, will be super stars in my eyes.  With that,  here is a post of the SharePoint MVP status on MSDN forums.  Those of you on the bottom half…your notice has been served.

 

Name Points Posts Answers
Fabrice [MVP] 10796 1417 770
Mike Oryszak 8589 1384 530
Moonis Tahir 7168 1208 474
John D. Ross 6934 1493 348
Waldek Mastykarz 6544 1130 404
Gary Lapointe 5106 830 324
Ishai Sagi[MOSS MVP] 3830 596 255
Randy Drisgill 3409 624 207
Michael Nemtsev [MVP] 3326 722 198
John Timney 3125 446 209
Wictor Wilén 2795 444 172
Ayman El-Hattab 2308 269 113
Becky Bertram 2122 281 137
Matthew McDermott, MVP 2043 619 89
Paul stork 1841 260 115
Andrew Woodward 1593 397 86
Mirjam van Olst 1532 234 92
stephane eyskens 1252 227 74
Jan Tielens 1198 197 80
Philippe Sentenac 944 184 58
James Milne 784 168 43
Andrew Connell [MVP] 731 168 44
Kanwal Khipple 689 123 41
Renaud Comte 656 170 32
Liam Cleary [SharePoint MVP] 604 73 40
Asif Rehmani, MVP 548 84 32
Nick Swan 486 132 22
Spencer Harbar [MCM] 466 65 29
Todd Klindt 459 100 26
Nicolas Georgeault 422 121 16
Gabriele Del Giovine 390 77 22
Marwan Tarek 368 49 23
Wes Preston 322 57 16
Darrin Bishop 288 74 16
Jerry Yasir 284 52 16
Pierre Vivier-Merle. 251 64 12
Ivan Wilson 246 105 11
John Holliday 226 73 12
Ben Robb 219 32 12
Panagiotis Kanavos 214 47 11
Sahil Malik 178 54 8
Romeo Pruno 176 36 12
Bob Mixon – SharePoint MVP 158 40 9
Michael Greth 147 36 8
Agnes Molnar 134 34 12
Steve Sofian 126 28 6
Ed Musters, SharePoint MVP 102 21 5
Ton Stegeman [MVP] 92 14 7
Pierre Erol Giraudy 88 29 4
Bander Alsharfi 88 23 5
Chandima [ MVP SharePoint ] 86 23 3
Ricardo Muñoz 83 24 2
Kevin Laahs 76 28 2
Kathy Hughes 73 15 4
Benjamin Curry 71 13 2
Fumio Mizobata 65 10 4
Sampathperera 62 11 4
Matt Ranlett 44 8 2
Wouter van Vugt 44 17 1
Dan Holme 41 10 2
Bil Simser [MVP] 34 14 1
Carsten Keutmann 32 6 1
Reza Alirezaei – MVP 30 5 2
Robert L. Bogue 30 11 1
Shane Perran 28 4 2
Igor Macori 28 7 2
Sharad K.- MVP 17 10 0
Brian Farnhill [MCP] 16 3 1
Bill English61 16 10 0
Haaron Gonzalez 14 2 1
Aleksandr Chervyak 13 13 0
Christoph Müller 12 26 3
Muhanad Omar 12 7 0
Eli Robillard 10 8 0
Sarbjit Singh Gill 6 8 0
Amanda Murphy 6 3 0
Rehman Gul 6 3 0
Serge Tremblay MVP 2 3 0
Penny Coventry 2 1 0
Rob Foster 2 1 0
David Mann 2 2 0
Loke Kit Kai 2 13 0
Dave McMahon 2 1 0
Daniel Larson 2 2 0
Shane Young 0 2 0
Carlos Segura Sanz 0 0 0
Brendon Schwartz 0 0 0
Didier Danse 0 0 0
Mohamed Zaki 0 0 0
Peter Yu 0 0 0
Steve Smith 0 3 0
Ted Pattison 0 0 0
Goran Husman 0 0 0
Daniel Wessels [MVP] 0 0 0
Daniel Seara 0 0 0
Stephen Cummins 0 0 0
Gaetan Bouveret 0 0 0
Hiroaki Oikawa 0 0 0
Will Ho 0 0 0
Ruben Alonso Cebrian 0 0 0
Shady Khorshed – MVP 0 0 0
Qifeng Zhao 0 0 0
Fabian Moritz 0 0 0
Todd Baginski 0 0 0
Thiago Soares 0 42 0
Mark Orange 0 0 0
Juan Manuel (Manolo) Herrera 0 0 0
saifullah 0 3 0
Matt Smith 0 0 0
Dieudonne 0 0 0
Gustavo Adolfo Velez Duque 0 0 0
Riwut Libinuko 0 0 0
Muhammad Imran Khawar 0 0 0
Fengbiao Liang 0 0 0
Bill Brockbank 0 0 0
Jing Ma 0 0 0
Maxim Kozlenko 0 0 0
Shailaja Muthu Kumaran 0 0 0
Daniel William Brown 0 0 0
Alex Pearce 0 4 0
Chee Meng, Patrick Yong 0 0 0
Joseph Tu 0 0 0
Majid Ardforoushan 0 0 0
Debbie Ireland 0 0 0
Juan Carlos Gonzalez Martin 0 0 0
Ed Richard SGC 0 0 0
Juan Andrés Valenzuela 0 0 0
Hector Insua 0 0 0
Chris O'Brien 0 2 0
Vincent Rothwell 0 0 0
Yoshiaki Nishita 0 0 0
Jakub Gutkowski 0 0 0
Joy Rathnayake 0 6 0
Baowei Guo 0 0 0
JinHo Baek 0 0 0
Mohammed A. Saleh 0 0 0
Qiuguang Zhao 0 0 0
Woodrow Windischman 0 0 0
Quang Ba Nguyen 0 0 0
Steve Curran 0 0 0
Rouslan Grabar 0 0 0
Kazuhiko Nakamura 0 0 0
Anton Lavrov 0 0 0
Arno Nel SharePoint Magazine 0 0 0
Sean Wallbridge 0 0 0
Randy Williams 0 0 0
Alain Lord 0 0 0
Vladimir Medina 0 0 0
Valy Greavu 0 0 0
Alexander Romanov 0 0 0
G Vijai Kumar 0 0 0
Mohanad Omar 0 0 0
Zac Smith 0 0 0
Panagiotis Kanav 0 0 0
Steven Van Craen 0 0 0
Paul Schaeflien 0 0 0
vivekthangswamy 0 0 0
Robin Meure 0 0 0
Oksana Prostakova 0 0 0

Why I hate Hyper-V (aka DyperV)

There's a reason I call it Dyper-V.  Its an immature product and it craps itself every time you need it to do something.  Frankly, I have lost 5 weeks of my life and $40K in productivity just from being "forced" to use this product.  It amazes me that any software company in the world would release a product like this and still actually be able to call itself a software company.  Every product group inside Microsoft is forced to use this embarrassing product.  That in-itself creates a cascading effect throughout all the organizations inside Microsoft.  Frankly, I'm surprised that the other groups put up with such substandard software when they are held to such high standards themselves. If I have to take the heat first, so be it, but let this be the blog post that actually gets all the groups to stand up and say, fuck you Dyper-V.  So, let's get started in my long list of why Dyper-v sucks:

  • UI is about as responsive as a overdosed dead drug addict in a dark alley way.  Why?  Asynchronous tasks are great in most apps, but not in Dyper-V. If you try to do anything in the UI, it may or may not do it and it may or may not tell you it did it.  Things like deleting or reverting snapshots is an example.  I had one time that Dyper-V UI just simply ignored the fact that I told it to revert and then I deleted the snapshot.  I lost a day of work because of the UI.  Damn it.
  • Exporting a VM.  Are you kidding me?  You have two options, export the configuration or export EVERYTHING oh and be sure you wait at *least* 5 minutes for any previous snapshots to be deleted, otherwise they will show up in any immediate exports you do!  Oh, and if two VM HDD point to the same base, guess what…it fails on export after 30 minutes!  Umm, and when your exporting, HyperV thinks that the RAM of the VM is being used.  What the fuck?  Really?  Are you guys retards?  I have to say that the entire Dyper-V team should be fired over these alone!  Seriously, fire them all (except for the guy that wrote the actual hardware interface layer, that part is pretty good) and start all over.  See if you can find some out of work VMWare guys, oh sorry, YOU CAN'T.  I can't even begin to tell you how much time I have lost waiting for Dyper-V to export a VM simply because it wants to export the entire parent VM chain.  Freakin retarded…FIRE them all (devs, ui, product managers, program mangers and the BG)!
  • Importing a VM.  Fails almost 100% of the time when moving VMs from one dyper-v server to another.  Why?  It puts specific ACLs on the files for the specific machine they were run on.  It fails if you import from another Dyper-V machine.  How stupid is that?  OH, did I mention that if it fails on an import, it deletes the configuration xml file?  Yeah, that's retarded too, get a hint dyper-v team!  Any what's up with you can't copy files, you HAVE to export and
    import. If your OS dies without an export you lose your VMs!
  • Trying to take advantage of chained VMs – In building a chained set of VMs, we thought we could gain back some disk space by implementing a full set of VM changes and then reversing out the small changes we needed.  In the end, we got screwed by dyper-v again.  Why?  We'll, it writes the entire paging space to the differencing disk EVERY TIME.  WTF…
  • Creating VMs – Every time you create a new VM with the VM network adapter, the windows OS sees it as a new adapter and forgets about any previous IP settings.  We (I and the internal Microsoft group) didn't learn about the legacy adapter until later in the process that could have saved us days of headaches
  • Deleting a VM – OMG, seriously?  If you delete a VM you can't get it back (right, the config file got delete)…really?  So freaking stupid.  ADDED:  When you delete a VM, it collapses all your
    snapshots AND THEN deletes your VM, and leaves behind the VHD!
  • Shutdown of a Windows Server os takes forever!  Why?  related to the last one, its writing out the entire page file to the vhd.  I have wasted at least 30 minutes of my life every time I have had to shutdown a VM.  stupid.
  • Why the hell can't I get a file out of Dyper-V VMs easily without connecting to a separate network?
  • Did I mention that most Fortune 100 companies have dropped support for Dyper-V?  Yeah, they hate it as much as I do at this point.  The only people that use it, are people that don't have the budget to buy VMWare and want to use the "FREE" stuff.  Guess you get what you pay for…
  • On and on and on and on…

If the Dyper-V team wants me to take this blog post down, you can pay me the $40K you lost me in productivity.  If the VMWare guys want me to keep it posted, you can pay me $40K.  First one to pay me wins.

Just a note, the term DyperV wasn't actually first used by I in casual conversation.  That credit goes to Dan Holme, @DanHolme.  He has similar feelings about DyperV as displayed in this blog post

Chris

Twitter: @givenscj

SharePoint 2010 – San Diego Release Party 5/12 Karl Strauss Brewery

Join us at 7pm at the Karl Stauss Brewery to celebrate the release of SharePoint 2010!  We will have some nifty swag to give out to the first 25-30 people.  The first 100 registered will get a free #SharePint!

https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=148053

There will also be a HUGE announcement made at the event. You won't want to miss this!  HINT:  It will be the first of it's kind of site running SharePoint 2010 that everyone in San Diego that loves SharePoint will want to see first hand!

Chris

CJG’s Theory

I have always been a Star Trek fan, watched every episode of every version (my courses show you how much I like it, especially when you get to the labs with the picture of George Takei and I).  Sure there were good and bad ones, but always entertaining.  Star Trek is the whole reason I got into technology in the first place, love it!  Had the oppty to meet all the Star Trek actors one day, it was awesome. Similarly, I have always been a fan of space and technology. 

I have followed the theories and watched the discoveries and have been impressed with what we have figured out over the years, especially the things that Gene Roddenberry forecast (cell phones, lasers, etc). Some of the more interesting things have always started from theories.  When you watch the progression of things from theory to fact, you realize, everything always starts with some absurd theory, many of Stephen Hawking's have been pretty absurd, but always debated and improved upon in the community.  So with that, I want to share my theory on relativity:

I was driving from the DMV today and noticed a fly in the car.  The fly is dumb (we presume anyway), and had no idea it was in a car traveling at 50MPH.  It was flying forward with no real effort and with respect to the earth, was actually traveling faster than me or my car was.  It was ignorant of this fact of course.  But that puts things into perspective right, did you know you are on a planet travel several 10's of 1000's miles per hour around the sun, when in turn is traveling at who's knows how fast around the black hole at the middle of our galaxy?  Probably not eh?  Einstein said that everything is relative, physics even dictates that point of reference is important when calculating anything.  When you look at Hawking's theories, he says the blur at the end of the black hole is where you are traveling so fast that you seem to "disappear".  At first, it led him to believe that matter disappeared into the hole completely (as in destroyed, or simply, didn't exist anymore), but in reality, it is still there, but moving so fast, yet the light of it being pulled into or some slowly able to escape the gravity of the black hole that we can't see it.  Think of it in terms of if you move faster, than the speed of light (without gravity affecting you), everything will seem to have stopped, or possibly, you start to move in time (from your perspective).

With that laid as the foundation, consider that matter can be broken down to the protons, neutrons and electrons that make it up (we'll skip anti-matter for the time being).  The large particle collider is trying to prove that there are particles that make up these three things, the Higgs Boson particle (some call it the "God" particle, but that's just a silly name).  They say that the particle has been so hard to find because it moves so fast and between what they are calling 11 dimensions.  The basic human brain can really only fathom the first 4 dimensions (X, Y, Z, Time).  The rest, well, have been tough to think about…until now.   String theory seems interesting to me when correlated to something I have noticed over the past few years.  But before we get to that, let me state what I believe:

First and foremost, I believe that THERE IS some type of energy or component of the basic particles that is moving between these dimensions.  How many dimensions, frankly don't know, don't care.  The fact that is important is the dimensions exist.  If there is a sub-particle that is moving between the other particles, what is its frequency of being in our dimension?  In other wards, is there some type of formula that will describe that frequency like a sine or co-sine wave?  It could be way more complicated than a simple sine wave, but for simplicity, let's go with it. 

Let's say the wave is actually broken across the dimensions in a circular fashion (like token ring – the more advanced and better technology than ethernet ever was).  If the particle moves away from us, then all of its energy will be devoted to the dimension it is in at that moment.  I can't say if the closest dimensions get some benefit from being next to the dimension that currently holds the token, but my guess would be that they do (if simply that they were the last or first with it).  If this is the case, then string theory kinda goes away and it should be called "ring" theory.

Let's now say that the wave is still broken across the dimensions, but let's think of it as a line rather than a circle.  This puts "string" theory back in play as the formula that represents the energy of the token as it moves across the dimensions.   When the token is farthest from us, we are at the apex of the bottom of the curve.  When the token is with us, we are at the top of the apex.  In my theory, the "string" part is the map of the energy wave created across the dimensions.  This would imply that all dimensions are mapped out in a particular order.  I don't like that.  With everything in the universe, PI seems to rule.  The earth is round, the sun is round, particles that gather in space form round.  Why a straight dimensional map?  Would it make sense for it to be a circle of dimensions?

Now, with that second set of theory out of the way.  How might we calculate when the energy or token is with us?  Back to my observation of the past 32 years on this planet.  There seem to be days when everything (events, to-dos, etc) falls on that day.  It is also evident that in my observations on twitter, there are days when the entire world is super happy, and days when the entire world is super sad.  This is not just simplistic coincidence, but a literal convergent to a single day.   Now, a day is a relative thing to us.  In the view of space and time and the universe, a day (24 hours as humans have defined it) is such a small amount of time.  It is my theory, that these convergences are when we have the token (world happy days) and when we are farthest away from the token (world sad days).  I can say that I have only seen a few of these events in my lifetime, but they were VERY noticeable.  Or conversely, the token is bad energy and we don't want it!

It is my belief that it will be on those days, where we will be able to see the particle in the collider.  All the other days we won't have it and there will be no point in trying to find it. 

Let's take a step back, so what if I'm right?  How do we keep from accepting the token, is there anything we can do, to make it skip us if it is truly bad?  Is there anything that we could do to keep it if its good?  What if we determine the formula that maps the path of the token across the dimensions and how long we actually have it?  Do we post it on the internet and tell people that, in the words of Ice Cube, "today is going to be a good day!", or in the case of evil, that today is going to be a bad day and there is nothing you can do about it?

I have never seen a theory like the one I have been thinking about, so I figured, why not post it, see if someone in the physics community checks it out and say…damn…CJG might have something there!

ADDED:   What if the matter that enters the black hole speeds up to a point that it is expended as multi-dimensional heat energy (similar how the sun emits its solar energy)?  Would that mean that the actual sub-particle/energy we are looking for is part of a passing worm hole of dimensional "heat" expelled from the black hole?  This could in fact prove that what the collider is trying to do by sending two particles towards each other at light speed and in effect hit each other at twice light speed woul
d imitate the effect of the black hole (but not create a black hole) and therefore open a temporary view into the transformation of matter into dimensional energy?  If this is the goal and proves to be fact, would it be possible to open an area large enough to be able to inject conscious matter into it?  If you were able to do this, would you even be able to return to a dimension that would bring this consciousness back in the same form?  Would there not need to be another device sitting on the other side to catch your passing dimensional energy wave?

Ok, back to SharePoint 2010!
Chris

Uninstalling Office Web Apps – Be Careful!

I am building the final VMs for our 10174 course, we are trying to minimize the VM sizes and trying to do some interesting things.  As part of this process, I'm finding all these interesting things about all the products we threw into the images.  One is:

Uninstalling Office Web Apps 2010 will remove your SharePoint server from the Farm!  Not sure why it does this, I would have expected it to just remove the service applications and delete files and registry keys while leaving the WFE connected to the Farm, but alias, no.   Watch out when doing this, you will take your farm down for a little while until you re-attach the server to the Farm.

Oh, and make sure you have your farm passphrase handy…after rejoining, it *looks like* all service applications are setup correctly so you won't have to re-run the Farm Configuration Wizard.

Unfortuantely the farm is left in an instable state, DO NOT UNINSTALL OFFICE WEB APPS!  : Blog here

Chris

SharePoint 2010 has explicit deny!

What?  Are you serious?  The DenyPermsMask column is used now???  Oh yeah my friends, it can be used now!  Unfortunately, it can't be used at the site/web level.  It is in the web application policy level where you can now specify the explicit deny on permissions.  We have been waiting for this since SP1 of SharePoint 2007!

You can configure explicit deny on the SharePoint Central Administration by:

  1. Open Central administration
  2. Click Applicaiton Management
  3. Select a web application
  4. In the ribbon click  Permission Policy
  5. Click "add Permission Policy Level"
  6. Give it a name like "My Deny Policy"
  7. Notice that all the site level permission are displayed with a Grant and a Deny check box!  Cool!

 Chris

Migrating User Forms Based Permissions in 2010 Upgrade

So not everything gets upgraded in the RTM build of 2010.  Seems the usernames and permissions end up getting lost when you upgrade.  There are several things you have to do to get your upgraded forms based authentication to work:

First error you will get is "Forms Based Authentication on classic Web applications has been deprecated."  this is solvable by opening SharePoint 2010 Management Shell to upgrade the web application to use claims based authentication

$w = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webappurl/"
$w.UseClaimsAuthentication = $true;
$w.Update()
$w.ProvisionGlobally()

Second thing is to enable your forms based auth in the SecurityToken Service as in my other blog post

Next you need to ensure that your settings are valid in the Framework64 directory if you are using the machine.config to propagate your sql server settings for Aspnetsqlmembership.  This changed as SharePoint is now 64bit, and not 32bit.

Once this is done, you will NOT be able to login!  Why?  Because the internal naming of the user you have setup as the site collection administrator was tied to the old aspnetsqlmembershipprovider:username naming scheme in the databases.  The new naming convention is  i:0#.f|aspnetsqlmembershipprovider|username

How do you update this?  well, other than going into the database and updating it directly, you really have only one other choice, remove and add each user!  If you have 100's of users, if not 1000's, well your in for a long day!  Luckily, I wrote a nice little powershell script that goes in and adds/removes all the users.  Here it is (as with anything, use at your own discretion):

$spweb = get-spweb "webappurl"
foreach($spgroup in $spweb.groups)
{
write-host $spgroup.name

foreach($spuser in $spgroup.users)
{
write-host "Migrating: " $spuser.name
$newuser = $spweb.ensureuser($spuser.name)
write-host "SPUser=" $spuser
write-host "NewUser=" $newuser
write-host "Adding user:" $newuser.name " to group: " $spgroup.name
$spgroup.adduser($newuser)
if ( $newuser.userlogin -ne $spuser.userlogin)
{
write-host "Removing old user:" $spuser.name " from group: " $spgroup.name
$spgroup.removeuser($spuser)
}
}
}