As much as anything, this is a reminder for me. We had a customer who were trying to run a PowerShell script that, ultimately, relied on an assembly that was contained in a WSP we’d written. The script wouldn’t work, however, and it transpired that the WSP had not been deployed to the server that they were running the script on. Continue reading “WSP Not Deployed to a SharePoint App Server”
Central Admin
Deleting the Search Service Application hangs
So, related to my previous post, we had problems initially deleting the Search Service Application. The Search Content Application’s Database had become ‘Suspect’. I’ve had this happen a few times before (I’m not sure why – I ain’t a DB Admin) and I have a little script that I run that seems to fix this, mostly.
EXEC sp_resetstatus 'PROBLEM_DB_NAME'
GO
ALTER DATABASE PROBLEM_DB_NAME SET EMERGENCY
DBCC checkdb('PROBLEM_DB_NAME')
ALTER DATABASE PROBLEM_DB_NAME SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
DBCC CheckDB ('PROBLEM_DB_NAME', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)
ALTER DATABASE PROBLEM_DB_NAME SET MULTI_USER
GO
No, I’m not entirely sure of the logic of how it works, and I’m pretty sure I can here DB Admins across the world screaming, but for my dev systems that I can afford to trash, it seems adequate.
Anyway, on this occasion it didn’t work, so I decided to simply delete the Search Service Application. I tried this through the UI – but it just seemed to hang. I tried again – and it seemed to hang. It wasn’t going away. I tried PowerShell – which took me a while as I’m still a fan of STSADM – and that didn’t work.
In the end I found the solution – on Donal Conlon’s blog – use STSADM -o deleteconfigurationobject
Yes, there’s a certain irony in that.
Breadcrumbs in Central Admin and Application Pages
This is a reminder of a couple of problems that I’ve come across a few times – that the breadcrumbs in LAYOUTS pages and central admin are a bit tricky.
Breadcrumbs in Layouts pages are driven by an XML file in your IIS web app. Now, you can add entries which are merged into that – a described by Jan Tielens’ Adding Breadcrumb to application pages in SharePoint – the easy way. However, this doesn’t cover the whole problem – he goes on to describe dealing with Central Admin too.
However, the really tricky bit of this that though we can define our own sitemap.xml file, it’s kind of hard to merge with the existing one. Specifically, the problem is that to merge ‘our additions’ and the ‘existing file’, we have to call a function ApplyApplicationContentToLocalServer, and as brilliantly described by Sean McDonough, the word ‘local’ is a problem in this method – it only forces a merge of the files on one server. Not much use in a server farm.
Sean’s article describes his attempt at a fix – using a one-time timer job, and a fair bit of reverse engineering of the ApplyApplicationContentToLocalServer function. Also, it seems like Vince Rothwell has come up with a similar solution, so it’s likely that this is a good approach.
A real pain to have to build so much to do such a simple task, though.
Andy Burns' Blog 