26 October 2005

WSS Recycle Bin


http://spaces.msn.com/members/joeloleson has been involved in the development of some pretty cool tools that are now availabe on GotDotNet.  The best one is the ability to add a recycle bin to WSS without requiring double the space as previous solutions had.  This one intercepts the calls via an ISAPI filter, but you can read more about it here:
The GotDotNet workspace for the code can be found here:
Good job guys!
Later
C

13 October 2005

Hawaii video


Here’s two videos I’ve taken thus far on vaction:
Later
C

Aloha!


Aloha!  Greetings from the island of Oahu in beautiful Hawaii!
I know, I know… two vacations within the span of one month!!!
What can I say… you have to strike a good balance between work and play…  I think I’ve found the sweet spot!
Problem is that I don’t have more vacation time to take now.  Pity… 
OK, so let me recap what’s happened thus far!
We dropped our puppies with their grand parents over the weekend.
What a heart breaker that was.
Knowing we wouldn’t see them for almost two weeks… that’s though!
Apparently though, they didn’t even whine when we left.
The good thing is that we know they’re in the best care with grandma and grandpa… come to think of it, they’re probably being spoiled rotten!  So much for all the training huh? 
So we returned home on Sunday.
Packed, watched the Colts brush of the Jags and the Cowboys simply pummel the Eagles!
Had dinner with our friends next door to wrap up the weekend.
OK, woke up on Monday.
Got to the airport with plenty of time to spare.
Boarded the ATA flight and then… well, the ground crew had found a problem with the Boeing 757′s Auxiliary Power Unit (APU).  The result was that they had to replace the APU.  So we de-boarded the plane again, went to get some brunch from Subway in the airport and then waited for the work to be completed.  We finally managed to get off the ground about an hour and a half after our scheduled departure time.
The flight to Vegas was about 4 hours or so.  Upon landing we got off to stretch our legs.  Being Vegas, there was some slot machines right there in the airport.  OK, so I took $10 to play the quarters machines.  Amy took $5 and I took $5.  I won $2 and $1.50 and normally I don’t replay winnings, but they starter boarding the flight, so I just stuck it into two machines.  I stated playing both at the same time and lo and behold… I struck a winner for $20.  I know, big deal, but at least my streak of never loosing when I go gambling is still in tact! 
Then we started the looooooooong flight to Honolulu.  The flight, about 8 hours, was tiresome.  Of course, we got to see two movies during the flight.  The first, "Bewitched" was OK I guess seeing as it was free.  The second movie, "Guess Who" was much better.
When we finally got to Honolulu, the pilot made one of the more forgetful landings I’ve ever experienced!  I’m sorry, but as a former military pilot, I’m kinda critical about these kind of things.
Anyway, we were just glad to finally be on the ground again and able to stretch our legs.
We hopped on a shuttle to our hotel, the Holiday Inn in Waikiki.  We waited about 20 minutes for the shuttle, but at $16 it was much less expensive that a cab.
One of the first things we noticed was that it gets dark very early over here.  By 19h00 it’s pitch black outside.  Of course the wonderful 74 degree temperature is great given we were leaving Indiana in the 50′s.
Got to the Holiday Inn and checked into room 1004.  The view isn’t great, but then we don’t intend to spend much time in the room anyway! 
We were tired from the long flight, so we just stayed in, ordered room service and by the time 19h30 (00h30 Indiana time) rolled around, we were wiped out.  So we went to bed.  Of course, Amy woke up around 04h00 (09h00 Indy time) and turned on her bed light to read.  Well, that woke me up, so I sat up and started reading too.  Next thing I know, she turns off her light, rolls over and goes back to sleep! 
Well, I’m up, so I stayed up.
On Tuesday, we went to explore and see where everything is.  Waikiki has everything within walking distance, so we have not needed to rent a car yet.  We found the wharf and the Waikiki beach very quickly.  We also found a supplier for our stacks and stuff in the "ABC Store".
We spent the remainder of the day on the Waikiki beach.  Umbrella and seat rental is a little stiff at $30, but if you book in advance (and pay in advance of course) you can get it for $20 per day. 
I went snorkeling, but the water was too murky to see much.  It was fun just floating on my back for an hour though.  Its amazing how quickly you can unwind in an island paradise like this!
We felt like seafood, so we went to the Chart house for dinner.  I had the Yellow Fin Tuna and Amy the Red Snapper.  Dinner ran about $90, but they had a desert to die for.  It was some kind of caramel ice cream with Macadamia nuts, Kiwifruit, Blue Berries, Strawberries, Blackberries, Raspberries and Banana.  Yum! 
 Still being on Indiana time, it being dark by 19h00 and there being nothing much on TV, we called it a night around 20h30.  I was missing my Tempurpedic bed and did not sleep to well on the hotel bed so when Amy stirred around 02h00, I woke too.  We decided to rent a movie through pay per view.  We got "Mr. & Mrs. Smith".  Good movie.  Pretty funny at times.  Of course, after about the first half hour, Amy rolled over and went back to sleep!!!  Mmm… I see a trend here! 
Any way, the movie finished around 4 AM and went back to sleep as well.  Finally woke up around 06h30.  I had decided to try another beach where the water might be more clear to allow some more snorkeling.  We were going to visit Hanauma Bay.  So we packed our stuff and walked over to the Hilton for the bus pickup around 09h30.  We caught the #8 but to Waikiki shops.  We transferred over to the #22 bus at 10h00.  We were the first Waikiki stop and that was a very good thing.  The bus was practically empty when we got on, so we took two seats right at the front.  There must have been at least two dozen stops between Waikiki and Hanauma Bay and at every stop, more people got on.  By the time we reached Hanauma Bay, we had given new meaning to the phrase "Squeezed in like sardines".  We were fortunate to have seats because aside from someone bumping into you every once in a while, it wasn’t a bad ride.  Of course the price was right costing only $2 per person!
Well, we finally made it to Hanauma Bay around 10h40.  Then we waited… and waited… and waited…
Of course, some of us did not like waiting… what with the long bus ride and all…   Just get to the beach already!!!
We finally managed to get our tickets, $5 per person, at 11h01 but wait… yes, MORE waiting!  We still had to see the conservation video on the bay.  The video is only 15 minutes, but our view time was at 11h15 so we waited for another 1/4 of an hour.  The movie over, we FINALLY managed to get to the beach.  Given the time, we decided
I rented a "dry" snorkel set for $9.  Its the set that has the snorkel that doesn’t allow water in.  Well worth the extra $2.  Let me just say that Hanauma Bay was well worth enduring the wait and hassle!  I had a 27 exposure underwater camera which I filled up in about 10 minutes.  When those photos have been developed, I will post them here.  Pity you don’t get waterproof digital cameras! 
Anyway, spent most of the day snorkeling.  We left and caught the 15h10 #22 bus.  The driver wasn’t the most friendly of people.  He was about to complete his shift, so he was getting a little antsy I guess.  Anyway, we got dropped at the end of his route instead of 2 stop earlier where we could catch the #8 bus again.  We decided to just walk the last bit back to the hotel.
All in all not a bad day.  Here’s some more pictures of Hanauma Bay:
Now we have an "Ambassador Luau" event at the Polynesian Cultural Center planned for today.  It’s going to be great starting at 12h00 and not ending till 22h00!  A full day indeed!
Tomorrow we’re planning to take a helicopter ride around the island.  Fun!
Aloha
C

What a HECTIC week!


Forgot to post this one last week…
WOW!  Where has the time gone?
This week has been extremely busy for me.
See, we’re heading off to Hawaii for two weeks and have been trying to get everything wrapped up so the journey could be care free.
Of course Father Fate wouldn’t have any of it.
My current project is going very well.
We’re supposed to go live Nov 1st, but the users are already working in the final live production area, almost a month ahead of schedule!
Then it started.
First we found that users were not able to search their content they were loading in the newly built environment.
It’s a medium farm with a Web/Search server and a Job/Index server, both of which we just built.  The SQL server is a pre-existing production SQL Server machine.
I figured, no problem, we’ll just rebuild the search scopes.
So we did that… No go!
In fact, once we did that, it started blocking us from even acessing the "Configure Search and Indexing" page with a very strange "Access is denied" error message.
Mmm… never seen that before… 
OK, so maybe it’s the ID I’m using.  Even though I’m a box admin as well as a SharePoint admin, I though that just maybe something was missing.
So we logged on using the global domain (God) admin ID.
Surely this ID isn’t blocked from ANYTHING and will be able to get to the page right?
WRONG!!!  Again, no go! 
OK, time to get back to debugging basics.
Debugging Basics – Rule Number 1:  Assume NOTHING!
OK, so we checked that everything is configured the way its supposed to be.
Everything checked out.
Debugging Basics – Rule Number 2:  Simplify!
We had a SharePoint Portal Server setup, so in order to simplify I started by eliminating SPS from the equation and attempting to validate that Windows SharePoint Services’ search functionality was at least working.
Mmm… No go again!
So, neither SPS nor WSS search was working… Interresting… 
By this time we were also getting errors about not being able to connect to the Index server.
So in order to simplify even further, I moved the Job/Index functionality to the Web/Search server effectively turning our medium farm into a small farm.
If there was indeed a permissions issue connecting to the Index server, this would eliminate that error giving some concrete indication as to the source of the problem.
Interrestingly enough, we still had the Index server access error message.
Debugging Basics – Rule Number 3:  What’s new?
OK, so we’ve assumed nothing and have check, re-checked and tripple checked all settings and configurations.  We have simplified by narrowing our search just to WSS and on a small farm instead of a medium farm and yet… no progress…
So what is new?  Well, the WSS Service Pack 2 was released days before we built the servers and I felt comfortable using it given the long time it spent in Beta.
We had the servers fonfigured according to Best Practices with the SharePoint user account being only a member of Power Users on each server.
The option now became to remove WSS SP2 and go back to WSS SP1, but before doing that, we tried bumping the SharePoint user account to admin level to see what happens.
I figured, it may have been something caused by SP2.
We changed permissions and sure enough, now we were able to get to the "Configure Search & Indexing" page.  The really perplexing thing was that we weren’t able to create indexes though.
Stay tuned…
C

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