Friday, February 20, 2009

Secure MOSS site : Lockdown

Dear Reader,

Thought i should blog this today. As we know MOSS 2007 replaces Microsoft Content Management System, the MOSS sites are exposed to internet with the help of publishing site templates. I have noticed in many sites that the other collaboration pages like Allitems.aspx, Dispforms.aspx and other forms are accessible when we browse the site as a anonymous user. Hope the developers are not aware of the Lockdown feature avalible in sharepoint MOSS 2007. If we enable this feature the anonymouse users cannot access these collabration related pages.

To enable this feature the following command needs to be executed:

stsadm -o activatefeature -url -filename ViewFormPagesLockDown\feature.xml

If you have tried any other alternative way to implement this feel free to write it down.

Hope this helps & create an awareness to make your MOSS site safe & secured.

Reference: technet.microsoft, blogs.msdn

Thanks
Fauzi

Thursday, February 19, 2009

NTLM VS Kerberos

Hi,

Hope every one is curious to know the difference between NTLM and Kerberos authentication while connecting to SQL Server. When you setup Sharepoint MOSS server also there will be a option to choose either of one. When i was googling to know the major difference between them I found the interesting LINK which is too good.

Regards
Fauzi

Monday, February 16, 2009

Install FTP Service for IIS 7 in Window Server 2008

Hi,

I was about to setup FTP Service in my production server which is Window Server 2008 standard edition (x64). I was not able to find FTP publishing service in fresh installation. I did the following steps to install;

Server Manager -> Roles -> Under Roles Services : you can find FTP Publishing Service -> Select and click Add Roles Service to install the feature.

When i did the above steps, after installation to my surprise i found
FTP 6 got installed!

FTP Services 7:

Then from forums found Microsoft has written New FTP services (FTP Publishing Service 7) for Windows Server 2008 which could be downloaded from the following links:

Download FTP Publishing Service for Windows Server 2008 (x64)

Download FTP Publishing Service for Windows Server 2008 (x86)

Hope it helps...

Regards
Fauzi

Friday, February 13, 2009

SQL Server: How to reduce LDF file size

Hi...

I use SQL Server 2005 in my development server and the Database files (.MDF & .LDF) were in C drive. As we were working on the development the LDF (Transaction log files) increased drastically.
So i thought its times to reduce it or later it might make the system slow or space crunch would be there.

The tried following options to reduce the LDF file:

1. Right click on Database -> Tasks -> Shrink -> Files -> Choose File type : Log > Selected Shrink action : Release unused space & later Reorganize pages, Both did not help as the log was more than 1 GB whihc is not so much because i have seen some people had it more 40 GB when log file was not monitored frequently.

2. Used DBCC shrinkfile some time before, which was also not helpful.

Then found from the forums & did the following which worked:

Steps:
1. Make the database offline.
2. Right click & did 'Detach...' for the respective database.
3. Went to the file system where the LDF file resides and moved to a safer place.
4. Then on databases folder (below the Server icon), did right click & clicked Attach.
5. In Attach database window, selected the database & attached it without LDF file. So that system automatically created a new one which is of very small size :)

Thus the issue was solved. I believe there are other options as well to reduce LDF files,
If you are aware of any other options feel free to write it down :)

[Update: July 12 2009]

Now there seems to be much more easier way to reduce LDF file :)
http://mohammedfauzi.blogspot.com/2009/07/moss-sharepointconfig-ldf-file-grows.html

Thanks
Fauzi

Sunday, February 1, 2009

The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

Hi,

I think i should blog this today. I use Windows Server 2003 Standard edition as development cum test server.
I was supposed to setup Sharepoint instance & CMS site. When i tried to run IIS 6.0, the website was stopped & when i tried to start it showed the following error :

"The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion"

So I googled for the issues and tried the following are the solutions:

1. Disabled firewall

2. Disabled Antivirus for a while & checked.

3. Thought framework might not be installed properly so ran aspnet_regiis -i from C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727


4. Tried update to registry through regedit.exe as suggested by Microsoft support team

5. There was apache server running on the same server. As it was running on port 80, I changed the port for IIS to 82.

6. People in forum adviced to explore events logs, when i tried so i found that there was an error message registered saying "The World Wide Web Publishing Service service terminated with the following error: No mapping between account names and security IDs was done."
I suspected that there might be permission related issue. so gave permission for adminstrator account to default application pool and removed users marked as "Unknow".

7. Then googled further... found SP2(Service pack) for Asp.Net framework 2.0... downloaded & installed that as well...

restarted when ever it was necessary... thought let me take a break or else lets give Server a break (Lol), called it a day.

Next day at work when i was telling my attempts to my collegue, when he tried connecting to the server OMG It worked fine (Lol) I believe installing Framework 2.0 could have helped...

If you have faced a similar scenario please share us your solutions :)

Regards
Fauzi ~4Z