FuGeRTech

Microsoft is now offering SharePoint Designer 2007 for free!

Over the weekend, I helped install and configure a wireless network for James, my soon to be brother-in-law. The task was to connect the Internet service from his office at the back of his property to his house at the front of his property. We incorporated some “Aggie engineering” as James, an NMSU Alumnus,  called it. It wasn’t the cleanest of jobs, but it works!

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I’ve been using LogMeIn.com’s LogMeIn Pro for about a year now and it is great for accessing my desktops and laptops at home from anywhere. With most people carrying laptops these days it seems useless as one would have his/her computer along for the ride. However, when I am at work and there is a website blocked by WebSense or some other limitation that slows me down, I can jump onto my desktop at home and get something done without hassle. It also provides IT shops with the ability to manage hundreds of clients’ PCs from the office. This can be extremely helpful!

One annoyance I have though is with the ActiveX based remote desktop. Unfortunately, I am stuck with IE6 at work. I am not allowed to install IE7, Firefox, Chrome or any other browser than IE6. I also prefer not to run the ActiveX plugin in full-screen mode. I like to be able to quickly and efficiently tab to another window on my local desktop. Running it from the browser requires me to hide/un-hide the address bar and standard buttons though. I have Visual Studio 2005 though. So, I made a very quick little tool that allows me to maximize the space in which the browser sits. It is a Windows application but has nothing except a web browser object that fills the entire window. The default URL is http://www.logmein.com. It allows me to save my IE6 toolbar settings and maximize the space for my remote desktop!

I know, I know the tool is really simple and lame, but I figured not everyone has access to the development tools to make something like this. So, for the non-developers out there, I present FuGeRTech’s LogMeIn Interface v0.1.

Code is released under the MIT License.

I am willing to bet that not too many people run into this issue, but it is still good to know. On, my client’s web server began to stall due to a full C: drive. Their server is an economy model and the C: drive is only 16GB. After some quick investigation, I found that 3.5GB were being used in the C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12LOGS folder. This is the default location for the trace log. The path must exist on all servers in the farm, too. I decided to turn down the logging, at least temporarily, to get the server running again. To complete this task, I took the following steps:

1. Navigate to SharePoint Central Administration
2. Click Operations
3. Click Diagnostic Logging
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Trace Log section
5. Change Number of log files to 1
6. Change Number of minutes to use a log file to 5

My client’s server is back up and running again, and I should not have to worry about the Trace Log getting out of control again.

The downside is that my Trace Log only goes back to the last 5 minutes of work on the server. I am researching my options here. It may not be important enough though.

Summary: SQL Server 2005 does not support compressed folders. Don’t use them for database storage or backups.

I had a backup process running at work that would back up my server’s databases into a compressed folder. Everything was fine until my SharePoint database and another database grew larger than 32GB. My backups began to fail with an error that read:

The process cannot access the file
because another process has locked
a portion of the file.

I was stumped! I contacted a colleague that is a SQL Server expert, and she suggested using FileMon to watch for intruding processes. It may be the anti-virus software requesting the file in the middle of backing up. At that time, I ran my backups manually singling out the two that were failing to backup. I noticed that they would consistently fail at the 32GB mark. That drew my suspicion, and I did some googling to find that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 does NOT support compressed folders!

So, I moved my backups to a regular folder and all is well again. Even my expert colleague did not know of this problem. Luckily, I have read that SQL Server 2008 will support compressed folders.

I hope this information gets grabbed by the web crawlers as finding this information was NOT as easy as it should be.

Here’s another blogger that found this problem a year earlier than me!

http://clay.lenharts.net/blog/2008/01/28/backing-up-to-a-ntfs-compressed-folder/

While I am in the blogging mood today, I thought I would share a very helpful link. I was trying to figure out the proper way to retrieve the latest recurring events based on the current month. I Googled around for a bit before stumbling upon this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/05/14/understanding-the-sharepoint-calendar-and-how-to-export-it-to-ical-format.aspx

The key point is the query used:

SPQuery query = new SPQuery();
query.ExpandRecurrence = true;
query.Query =
    "<Where>" +
        "<DateRangesOverlap>" +
            "<FieldRef Name='EventDate' />" +
            "<FieldRef Name='EndDate' />" +
            "<FieldRef Name='RecurrenceID' />" +
            "<Value Type='DateTime'><Month /></Value>" +
        "</DateRangesOverlap>" +
    "</Where>";
// Look forward from the beginning of the current month
query.CalendarDate = new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, DateTime.Now.Month, 1); 

At my current place of employment, my development environment is limited to creating custom SharePoint tools through SharePoint Designer. I typically create an override to the OnLoad method to get my work done.

Today’s topic: a simple interface for checking out who has group memberships and where they have them. I came up with the idea after seeing the constant organizational changes and the employee role changes associated with them. So let’s talk about the two parts. If you just want the code without the breakdown, scroll to the bottom of the full article.

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Preface

My current day job is developing SharePoint-based web applications. On Thursday, September 11 (coincidence), the SharePoint site became unresponsive. It was not storing any new data, but viewing existing data was still possible. This was important as I have end-users that rely on reports stored in Document Libraries. The daily reports would not save onto the website.

I’m sure that this article is SQL Server Administration 101 for most folks. For those diving into SharePoint with no DBA, this could be a lifesaver.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Transaction Log Deletion – what happens when I lost the WSS_Content transaction log
Chapter 2: The Recovery – the steps to recovering the corrupt MDF file
Chapter 3: Prevention – best practices for database and transaction log backup and truncation

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First off, welcome to my first IT related post on FuGeRTech. A few weeks ago, my (soon to be) in-laws came to town. As they brought in their bags, Tamara’s father says to me, “hey Tony, I’ve got a project for you.” I turn to see a laptop bag in his hands. I think to myself, “must need an OS scrub, defrag, clean-up, etc.” I reply, “alright, what have you got there?” He pulls out the laptop. I see the first piece of it, and then it hit me… “OMG! My college laptop!” I had a 1200 series Presario my Freshman year.

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