SharePoint at ORNLNLIT SummitJune 2009

Brett D. EllisInformation Technology Services Division

2 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Overview

• SharePoint at ORNL– 2 Production Farms (Internal and External)• Internal - 2 Load Balanced Web Front Ends(WFE), 1 Index/Query, SQL

2005 Clustered, Several App Servers(SSRS, Ascentn)• External – 2 Load Balanced WFE’s, Index/Query resides on WFE 1.

– 1 QA Farm• 1 WFE, 1 Index/Query, SQL 2005, Several App Servers(SSRS, Ascentn)

– 1 Dev Farm• 1 WFE, 1 Index/Query, SQL 2005, Ascentn App Server

– 1 Backup/Restore Farm

• MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0– 64 Bit, Enterprise MOSS

3 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Overview – Problem Areas

• Search and Crawling• Patching• Your Task Lists aren’t sending E-mail• Migration from 32 Bit -> 64 Bit– Issues with Project Server Installation

• Streamline Code Deployment from DEV -> QA -> Prod

4 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Proper Search and Crawling

• How do you properly set it up– Content• Containers vs Items

– Schedule– Debug– Robots.txt– Name your Crawler

5 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Search and Crawling -> Content

• Content Source– A bucket of different content

• What goes in a Content Source– WebPages– SharePoint Sites– File Shares– Exchange Public Folders

6 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Search and Crawling -> Scheduling

• Is done at the Content Source level– Be careful how many you have– Be considerate when scheduling of crawls• SharePoint discards anything that has been in the queue for more than

an hour

• Off-Hours crawls• Distinct Server for Crawls– What ORNL is looking at to be able to crawl multiple times per

day

7 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Search and Crawling -> Debug

• Can look at a crawl log per content source– Can get onerous if you have many URL’s in one source

• Very easy to break out a single URL, and schedule a separate crawl• Common errors– Do you have proper read accounts setup– Does the crawler have permissions– Did you install December Cumulative update, without the

hotfix…

8 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Search and Crawling -> Robots.txt Frequency

• Robots.txt is read every 24 hours–We were concerned that it we were crawling with a stale robots.txt– HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\

Global\Gathering Manager\RobotsTxtRefreshFrequency– Change from default of 86400 seconds– More fun settings available at

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd630757.aspx

9 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Search and Crawling -> Name Your Crawler•When a content source only allows a crawler

with a specific name• Change the name at the location to be crawled• Or change the name of the crawler• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\\

Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager\UserAgent

Fred

10 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Proper Patching

• Cumulative patching much easier– Microsoft is producing a patch set every few months now that

is a cumulative set since SP1

• Had been patching with just MOSS patches, not the WSS Patches• All patches need to be pulled according to what you

have installed– WSS– WSS + MOSS– WSS + MOSS + Project Server

11 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Proper Patching - Correct Order

• Assumes MOSS/WSS• Install WSS Patch on all servers in farm• Install MOSS Patch on all servers in farm• Start Configuration Wizard on Central Admin/Index

Server– Wait for dialogue box that says run on every other system,

and leave up WITHOUT clicking OK

• Now run and complete Configuration Utility on all other servers one by one• When done, go back and finish on Central Admin

12 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Task List Not Sending E-mail

• Symptom: A task list isn’t sending e-mails as setup• Check the active alerts– Find the contentdb associated with the site in

question– Run the following query against that DB, or to be

safe a copy of that DB• Note: Any manual modification to the ContentDB’s will be strongly

frowned upon my Microsoft.

13 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Task List Not Sending E-mail (cont)

• Query SQL Database– Useful to watch alerts get properly sent– Natural flow is for alerts to be stored in eventcache

then cleared out with timer jobs• select * from eventcache where acl is not null– This query should result in either zero or very low

numbers• If you have a large number of results, then you need to

open a command prompt to a machine somewhere in your farm for the following stsadm commands

14 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Task List not Sending E-mail (cont)

• Are Alerts Enabled?– Command: stsadm -o getproperty -url http://site.ornl.gov/sites/alerts -pn alerts-enabled– Result: <Property Exist="Yes" Value="yes" />

• Are they going to be scheduled to run?– Command: stsadm -o getproperty -url http://site.ornl.gov/sites/alerts -pn job-immediate-alerts– Result: <Property Exist="No" />

• Schedule them to run– Command: stsadm.exe -o setproperty -pn job-immediate-alerts -pv "every 5 minutes between 0 and 59" -url http://site.ornl.gov/sites/alerts – Result: Operation completed successfully.

• Test that the command took:– Command: stsadm -o getproperty -url http://site.ornl.gov/sites/alerts -pn job-immediate-alerts– Results:<Property Exist="Yes" Value="every 5 minutes between 0 and 59" />

15 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Task List Not Sending E-mail (final)

• There are several other possibilities for alerts not running• Timer Service stuck on some machine in the farm– Restart the timer services across the farm

• Farm Admin passwords improperly set– Reset Farm Admin passwords

16 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Upgrade from 32 -> 64 Bit

• As of December 2007 SharePoint at ORNL was 32 bit only• Communication of patch level– Devs have personal farms– Created a page to advertise changes to interested parties

• For each farm there was a time period where the new farm and the old farm were both up– All changes had to be done to both

• Used file comparison tool to compare web.configs– We have several custom codes at ORNL

17 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Patch Page at ORNL

18 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Upgrade to DEV

• Notified Devs we were upgrading• Done months before QA and Prod– Not by design

• Concern of solutions working in 32 vs 64 bit up the chain• Testing Phase of both farms up at the same time• At cutover date, refreshed the ContentDB’s

19 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Upgrade to QA

• Project Server Uninstall– Issues with all our customization and the version of Project

Server at the time

• Copied ContentDB’s– Ran 64 bit farm in test mode for 2 weeks

• At cutover date– Turned 32 bit farm read-only, and refreshed ContentDBs

• Our Devs deploy solutions to Dev– Had to interface with Devs for proper solutions to deploy

20 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Upgrade to Prod

• Done almost identical to QA

• Had known set of WebSolutions from QA

• Ran 64 bit farm in test mode for three weeks– Current web-app name was bob– New web-app name was bob64

• On Cutover date, refreshed the Content

• Created a completely new SSP– Had issues with SSP, that caused us to have to rebuild

• Did with an overnight outage

21 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Issues in Upgrade to Prod

• Issues–Excel Services Trusted Location(absolute

path)• http://bob.ornl.gov/trustedlocation• http://bob64.ornl.gov/trustedlocation

–Populating Best Bets• Power Shell Script

–Syncing Mysite Profile Data• Used Microsoft User Replication Tool

22 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

How we install solutions

• Dev– Developers have Farm admin privs– Deploy their own solutions

• QA– SharePoint admin team deploys solution with help from devs, based on

their experience in DEV

• Prod– Once weekly, SharePoint admin team deploys solutions as it was

deployed in QA

• Task List– Very handy for historic changes to Farms, and so Developers have a one

stop shop to see if work was done

23 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Questions and THANKS!!!!

24 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy SharePoint at ORNL

Other ORNL presentations which might be of interest• SharePoint

– Monday, 11:45-Using SharePoint UI to Deliver General Use Applications, Connie Begovich

– Tuesday, 11:45-SharePoint at ORNL, Brett Ellis • Cyber Security

– Monday, 1:30-Development of a Process for Phishing Awareness Activities, Phil Arwood

– Monday, 2:15-How I Learned to Embrace the Chaos, Mark Lorenc– Monday, 4:15-TOTEM:The ORNL Threat Evaluation Method,John Gerber/Mark Floyd

• Desktop Management– Monday 4:15-On the Fly Management of UNIX Hosts using CFEngine,Ryan

Adamson– Tuesday, 11:00-Implementation of Least User Privileges, Doug Smelcer– Wednesday, 11:45, Microsoft Deployment Using MDT and SCCM, Chad Deguira

• Incident Management– Wednesday, 11:00-Helpdesk Operations for Clients Without Admin Privileges, Bob

Beane/Tim Guilliams• IT Modernization

– Monday, 2:15-12 Months of Technology, Lara James