Hardware Geeks

So today I had a stupid sharepoint bug, intermittently the homepage would lock up on load for users. So I log into the server and check things out and happen across the IIS Manager where I noticed nothing showed and I got an erroneous error message of “the path specified cannot be used at this time”. This is course was a useless message so I went ahead and did a forced IISRESET /RESTART this did nothing. I then went and dived into the windows application event log. Here I noticed the SharePoint Admin service was locked up, went into services and restarted it and everything is copacetic again and IIS loads fine now. Why the sharepoint admin service would be tied to displaying web applications and application pools in the IIS Admin I DO NOT KNOW.

So this is an old gripe of mine with SharePoint, it doesn’t set all the permissions it needs by default. This is shown through tons of Windows Error Log entries that look like this:

Application Server job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance (e085fa0b-2cae-4a45-9feb-db5b06c1fbec).
Reason: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} failed due to the following error: 80070005.
Techinal Support Details:
System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} failed due to the following error: 80070005.

This is easy to fix. Read on to see how.

So today I went to make a simple database based (that sounds weird but whatever), form in InfoPath for reporting security incidents, but InfoPath misread the datatype of my UID field which I had as a datetime time stamp of now(). It instead read it as simpleType with HEX data. This would cause the form to not submit properly, not tell the user it didn’t submit and change the formatting of the data. So I went in and hand edited the field type. Read on to find out how to hand edit field types in InfoPath.

I’m bored and want to code something, need ideas for something to write.
:D

So I needed a method of changing the status of a secondary list’s items based on criteria from another list’s item (in this case for checking in and out backup tapes), and didn’t see too much information around on how to go about doing this using a coded workflow and not infopath. So here’s my code I did up this morning to achieve this.

So last week I went and attempted an upgrade of my Sharepoint 2007 Enterprise install up to Service Pack 1. It didn’t go so smoothly you might say, and whomever wrote the upgrade routine for MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server - Microsoft marketing at it’s best), needs to go through some basic programming and administration classes.

The install failed miserably halfway through upgrade with no recovery options and what initially sounds like a complete system loss. Read on to find out how to recover from a failed database and binary update by hand. This is not for the faint of heart.

So this morning I had a slight issue with sharepoint after three user accounts in the domain accidentally got deleted due to synchronization issues. I found a simple way to fix the user account SID issue that causes errors around the site, and prevents access to MySite. Read on to see the fix.