RedKittenMac. Windows. Networking. Wireless. Internet.

While performing some maintenance for a client on their MOSS 2007 server farm, we found that a client was getting the following message when trying to access a page that contained the Bamboo Solutions Hello WebPart – the only option was to disable the offending WebPart.

Everything had worked fine in their test environment, but the production servers reported the following:

Request for the permission of type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Security.SharePointPermission, Microsoft.SharePoint.Security, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’ failed.

While Server Core is undoubtedly a great idea, sometimes you need to make a quick change or you need to check a setting and the relevant command just won’t come to mind. There is a solution! The Core Configurator is a CodePlex project that can be used to administer Server Core installations, and a new version (2.0) was released on the 1st of December 2009.

In a nutshell, it’s a small application that you can either copy to the server or else run from a USB stick or network drive. Here’s how to get it working on your system!

Another nice easy one – today I was asked what the latest version of SharePoint is, and how this information can be found. The easiest way is to visit the Updates Resource Centre for SharePoint and check the chronological list of ‘Major Updates and Issues‘.

To find out which version you’re currently running on your farm, go to ‘Central Administration > Operations > Servers in Farm‘ – at the time of writing, the most recent update is the October 27th 2009 Cumulative Update, which leaves your version number at 12.0.0.6520 – the latest service pack (SP2) leaves the version number at 12.0.0.6421. There are more details about version numbers here if you’re curious.

To install the updates, first install SP2 and then the latest cumulative update package – make sure you get the 64 bit version if that’s what you’re running, sounds obvious but you need to click ‘show additional downloads’ on Microsoft’s page to see both x86 and x64 so be aware. You’ll need both the WSS and MOSS update packages – run WSS first on all your servers, then run MOSS on them all, and then finally run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard on each in turn – this must be done one at a time or you’ll get errors.

Note that Microsoft recommend that you only install the cumulative update packages if you are experiencing the issues that they are intended to resolve – for maximum stability, stick to each Service Pack release.

Another simple one – I was asked today about the meaning of the ‘Search alerts status’ setting on the Search Administration page of SharePoint 2007. Basically, when a user does a search they have the option of saying ‘alert me’ which will tell the system to notify them if any new items are added that meet their search criteria.

Say for example they search for ‘weekly meeting’ and ask to be alerted. Next week when ‘weekly meeting 09′ is added, they should receive a notification. However, if for any reason the index has to be cleared and rebuilt, it’s going to find all the existing items as if they were new and annoy all your users. Therefore if you ever need to rebuild your index, you might want to consider turning off search alerts and then putting them back online once the rebuild is complete.

Here’s a nice simple one – how to change the location of your log files under IIS version 7. This came about because a client had configured their SharePoint farm to have small system partitions, with a larger partition for logging purposes. They had configured the SharePoint logging themselves, but needed the settings for their sites changed in IIS. Although it isn’t a complicated change, it is different to the older versions of IIS and can be confusing. Here’s how we did it!

If you’re anything like me then you probably find that over the course of a working day you end up with lots of remote desktop sessions open to various servers. Sometimes it’s tricky to remember which box you’re looking at, and that’s where BGInfo from Sysinternals/Microsoft comes in. It’s a small application that generates a bitmap wallpaper when you login, showing a number of useful things about the system such as IP address, hostname, disk info – there are lots of different options to choose from. I find it really useful, and what’s more it doesn’t have much of a hit on your machine as it only runs when you logon.

I’ve just found this site from Microsoft with some excellent training resources for Windows Server 2008 R2. Although it is entitled ‘Developer Training’, there are lots of things in there which are of interest to a systems administrator as well.

Of course, the main Channel 9 site has some other great courses available as well – currently Sharepoint 2010, Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010… plenty of useful and up-to-date information there.

Welcome to the RedKitten website. We’re a technology company, based in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Unlike many companies, we don’t baulk from the unusual or complicated issues. We love providing solutions for businesses and organisations that need innovative and flexible solutions to their problems.

We are Apple Macintosh specialists, but we’re also Windows experts too and that means we’re experienced at bringing the two together. Want your Mac users to log onto your Windows domain and share files? We can help. We do Mac OS X Server support as well, including setting up managed preferences, shared folders, etc.

Windows users shouldn’t feel left out though – Windows Server, XP, Vista, Exchange, ISA, SQL Server – it’s all in a days work for us. We can help, no matter what the problem.

Networking? Of course. DNS, DHCP, IP addressing, switches, firewalls, routers – if it has flashing lights on it, we can almost certainly make it do as you want it to.

This is just a brief introduction to what we do – check out the rest of our site for more information, and get in touch with any queries you might have – it costs you nothing to find out!