Been a bit quiet on here and the SUGUK forums this last week thanks to an almighty bout of man-flu.. Real strength sapping one this variation! All I’ve done is sleep and doze infront of the telly. Tried to go back to work this morning, but the temperature is still a little up and down. Let’s see how tommorrow goes.
Thu 29 Mar 07
Wed 21 Mar 07
SUGUK – London Meeting.
I’ll be attending the London meeting of the SharePoint User Group UK on Thursday evening. I believe there are still some places left, so take a look at SUGUK Mtg – London 22nd March @ LBi
The evening will be covering an InDepth look at SharePoint Search, looking at Set-up, configuration, customisation and limitations. This will be followed by an item on Building an accessible Internet site with SharePoint 2007, covering design to development, server environments, accessibility as well as a look under the hood at what drives the system.
Arrive at 6pm for a 6:30 start.
LBi, 1 Naoroji Street, London, WC1X 0JD, but you must add your name to the post on SUGUK if you want to come!
Thu 15 Mar 07
Configuring Central Administration to use SSL
During the installation process, there isn’t an option to select SSL for your Central administration pages. I would however advocate that even if you’re main SharePoint site isn’t going to use SSL, then your Admin pages should.
There’s a very good Microsoft article on this subject and this can be found here.
The basic process is as follows:-
You should now be able to connect to Central Administration via an SSL channel.
Mon 12 Mar 07
Mail working..
Is that a contradiction of words? Anyways.. I sorted the problem, it was the hosting server blocking outbound email. All new registrations will now receive their password.
Sat 10 Mar 07
Mail not working..
Ok, for some reason the mail out isn’t working. I’ll get this sorted and post here when it is. Then any subscribers will actually get their emailed password.
Thu 8 Mar 07
SUGUK User Group Meeting – Ullesthorpe
I attended my first user group meeting last night since joining the SUGUK forums. The evening opened with a presentation on Excel services by Andrew Woodward, followed by Design decisions by Bill English and then after a very nice buffet meal, Dr Bleeker took over and gave a very animated presentation on the possibilities for Site and Farm customization.
Whilst Andrew’s presentation didn’t go exactly as he’d planned, it was nevertheless very interesting and has given me some interesting pointers as to where we may deploy some of Excel services functionality within the farm.
Bill’s presentation was away from the technology and focussed more on the design decision one should undertake before setting anything in stone in a production environment. This content was drawn on from a wealth of Microsoft Whitepapers as well as some healthy common sense, and consolidated into a series of statements that you or your users can answer.
Finally the presentation that I was most interested in was the Site customization methods by Todd Bleeker. I’ve ready several of Todd’s documents across the web and found them very interesting, even if some were a little too deep for me at this stage. They didn’t prepare me however for the animated fella that stood in front of us last night to wax lyrical about the current availablity in MOSS 2007 as well as the proposed functionality due in SP1. To quote Todd, “The AJAX train is coming whether you like it or not..”
Guess I’d best get out and start learning a little ajax too… Does anyone ever manage to learn everything they need?
To read more from Todd, check out his blog at Mindsharp.
Fri 2 Mar 07
Kerberos.. The 3 headed nightmare!
10 hours!!!… Thats how long it took me to resolve a Kerberos issue.
It all started with finishing the installation of MOSS 2007 and then running the SharePoint Configuration wizard.
No major problems with this, I entered the SQL Server information, changed the default configuration database name and added the Service credentials.
Click next, and hit a wonderfully expansive error stating that I couldn’t connect to the farm or possibly using incorrect credentials. So I checked everything, group memberships, Server names, DNS settings. All I had in the Security event log was a very bare Event 529, against the Kerberos login method.
In the end, I decided to try and set-up a simple ODBC connection using a system DSN, and thats when I came across the rather more useful error “Cannot generate SSPI Context”
Well this at least pointed me to a reaosnably good KB article that covered this error in a more expansive way. KB811889 – How to troubleshoot the “Cannot generate SSPI context” error message
From that, I found another useful explanation of SQL’s authentication methods..
Understanding Kerberos and NTLM authentication in SQL Server Connections
And finally from this, worked out that because I was running the SQL Service under a domain account, it needed to be able to set it’s own SPN (Service Principle Name) for Kerberos, and therefore required to be a member of the Domain Admins.
I added the username to this group, restarted SQL, and lo and behold, I connected straight away.
So this now leaves me with a dilemma, do I leave the SQL server service running as a domain admin and tie it down through Group policy, or do i continue trying to find a better way to run under a normal domain user account…