Archive for the ‘SharePoint’ Category
Access companyweb from a remote location when https is not allowed over port 444
It could happen to all of us. We own a small business and we rely on SBS 2003 to run it. We work at a client and their firewall prevents https over port 444. How can we access SharePoint (companyweb)? Well, there is a solution as long as we run ISA 2004.
Create an A record that points to the external IP of the server (e.g. wss.publicdomain.com). Go to ISA Server and copy the SBS Windows SharePoint Services Web Publishing Rule. Paste it and rename it to something like CompanyWeb external
Edit the listener and change it from SBS CompanyWeb listener to SBS Web listener. We want incoming requests to be received on port 443
Under the Link Translation tab check the Replace absolute links in Web pages to make sure that URLs that use relative paths are being translated properly
Check to make sure that the Redirect requests to SSL port is pointing to port 444
Finally under Public Name add the of the FQDN that we will use to access the site
That’s about it. If we open a browser and we type https://wss.publicdomain.com we should be seeing the companyweb SharePoint site
I was working on a development environment (Windows Server 2003) when I decided to remove WSS 3.0 and reinstall it. I had a backup which i had created using the GUI wizards from within Central Administration.
You should have seen my surprise when I realized that the restore could not successfully be completed. I went through the process of removing and reinstalling WSS a couple of time but the result was the same. The steps I was following were identical.
a. Remove WSS from the Control Panel
b. Install WSS
c. Apply the WSS Update (KB932091)
d. Restore the backup.
It didn’t work. After spending a day and a half searching the Net for a solution something crossed my mind. I didn’t install the WSS Update before the restoration. I tried it and it worked!
After the successful restore, I applied the update and everything went back to normal
I don’t know why I decided to reconfigure WSS 3.0 on a test server, but something went wrong and I had to uninstall and then reinstall Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Since the uninstall, for some reason, didn’t finish successfully, I went to the registry and I removed a couple of entries. After rebooting the server, I reinstall WSS and then time came to run the configuration wizard.
Well….
Things weren’t that simple. The wizard could not pass step 2 (where it creates the configuration database). The interesting part is that when I run SQL Server Management Studio, the configuration database was listed there. I went ahead and dropped the database and re-run the configuration wizard. Same problem. The error was:
“Failed to create the configuration database. An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException was thrown. Additional exception information: The language is not supported on the server.”
It seems some of the entries I removed from the registry were required. To make the long story short, I spend sometime searching for answer and I found out that the following entry was required in the registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\ServerLanguage]
with key value “1033″=”"
After that the configuration completed and new the server is functional again.
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 uses Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition (SSEE). When we uninstall WSS, the database instance remains installed and requires manual removal. The following steps describe the process:
a. Locate the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Uninstall
b. In the left pane, click each GUID. For each GUID that you click, look for a display name in the right pane that matches “Microsoft SQL 2005 embedded Edition…”. When you see a display name that matches the name, copy the value of the Key named “UninstallString”
c. Open a Command-Window (Start->run->cmd)
d. Paste the Copied string.
e. Append “ CALLERID=OCSETUP.EXE” eg “MsiExec.exe /X{BDD79957-5801-4A2D-B09E-852E7FA64D01} CALLERID=OCSETUP.EXE”
f. Don’t forget to reboot.
