Troubleshooting and Support - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land

7/26/2008

Infrastructure Update Issues Informal Interview with Troy

I ran into Troy Star my favorite SharePoint tester yesterday in Friday Harbor, Washington. You have to appreciate the size of the SharePoint world and the randomness.

So with my 5 minutes with Troy, what did I do? I drilled him on the Infrastructure update and O14.

He first mentioned the AAM (alterate access mapping) regression. Regression meaning a bug that was actually unfortunately introduced and not caught before the release of the rich pack. The regression only appears to impact environments that use AAMs and not ISA. (ISA apparently can transparently work around the issue.) Not all the details have been released on this yet.

So I asked him who was affected and he said a basically anyone who was using internal and external alterate access mappings. It was defaulting to internal mappings. Didn't get the full explanation, but basically it was messing up the AAMs.

So I asked him if people should hold off, he said no not everyone, that people should test it first. I explained that many customers don't have AAMs that would replicate their production environments that would make the regression apparent.

There's so much goodness packed in that update it's unfortunate, but I would have to say that if you have an internet or extranet environment that even has basic AAMs I'd suggest waiting until this is fully vetted and we have post update rollups.

Dan Winter's (of product support) Blog has infrastructure update info on this. I expect him to have updates as we find out more. Of course the WSS Infrastucture Update KB itself should keep us up to date as well.

What did Troy say about O14? What can he say? He said they hadn't forgotten about it, but a lot of time was spent on the update. I totally understand, it's something I've been anticipating for over 7 months. Unfortunately many will see this regression as a temporary delay, for Internet and Extranet sites that use AAMs I'd have to agree.

In the meantime there is some functionality testing that can and should go on. Did you see Brenda Carter's search federation post? It's very thorough and even if you don't have "geo-distributed" environments it's relevant for pulling in search results from Live.com or other search federation scenarios. It also gives you an idea of the richness of the update.

There are quite a few posts on the Infrastructure update these days:

The SharePoint ITPro documentation team blog – Infrastructure Updates

Office Sustained Engineering blog – Announcing Availability of Infrastructure Updates

Get the Point, Microsoft Office SharePoint Blog - What’s new in the MOSS 2007 Infrastructure Update?

Posted at 11:43 PM by Joel Oleson | Category: Troubleshooting and Support | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

7/17/2008

I want verbose SharePoint errors when things break!

If you hate those generic general or unspecified error or unknown error occurred or even errors that failed and told you to contact the admin without telling you why you should contact your administrator? I really hate it when I am the administrator and it tells me nothing! Well you can turn on verbose errors that actually tell you something.

The web.config calls the application default as custom errors. It may seem counter intuitive to say "turn custom errors off," but essentially you're saying those friendly errors aren't telling me what I need. Here's three simple steps...

1) During your maintenance window, find in your web.config file in the <SharePoint><SafeMode> section the following line <customErrors mode="On"/> and simply change the "On" to "Off" (case sensitive).

2) Then look for Callstack="False" and change it to "True" (again case sensitive) this will actually give you the verbose (rich) details beyond the simple error codes.

3) Reset the affected app pool or app pools (or run iisreset on the command line if you're lazy or have no idea what I'm talking about...)

I know I'm not the first to say this, but I want to make sure this is more broadly understood. This is a great troubleshooting tip. Note it will require an app pool cycle to get this to take effect since the change is in the web.config file.

Also to note, if this is on the intranet and not exposed to external users you may find keeping the errors verbose reduces troubleshooting time. I can't argue with that. I caution for Internet sites for revealing too much detail.

Looking for more detail on this? Andrew Connell one of my favorite MVPs, has a developers quick post of making sense of SharePoint errors on this. This is obviously not new, but often not well understood that you can even do this. (Also, kudos to Shane Young for calling this out in SharePoint Survival Admin Class).

Posted at 10:57 AM by Joel Oleson | Category: Troubleshooting and Support | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

7/15/2008

It's Here! Infrastructure Update

This update is the highly anticipated content deployment, other fixes and search updates rolled up. There is both a WSS and MOSS update.

WSS 3.0 - KB951695

MOSS 2007 - KB951547

The Infrastructure Update was just announced on the team blog. You'll see from the description that it includes the new search functionality that shipped in Search Server. The Search "federation" functionality is the big one I've been waiting for. The content deployment fixes are by far the bulk of this update.

If you're looking to follow the updates, you can subscribe to through KBAlerts.

Feed for new Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 KB articles:

http://kbalertz.com/rss/WindowsSharePointServices30.xml

Feed for new SharePoint Server 2007 KB articles:

http://kbalertz.com/rss/SharePointServer2007.xml

Thanks to the folks at KBAlerts!

As with other hotfixes and updates it can pay to wait for early adoption tips and troubleshooting information. I would expect that the best practices around SP1 and updates on TechNet are still very applicable.

This update is HUGE. The download is ~240MB. So please be super cautious and be sure to test, test, test... don't do this in production first. I would say from a testing perspective you should spend at least as much time as you spent with SP1 if not more. I'd say more because of the functionality and significance of this update.

Posted at 1:13 PM by Joel Oleson | Category: Troubleshooting and Support | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)