How to restart SharePoint Central Administration service after stopping it via Central Admin GUI

If you've stopped the Central Administration service within the GUI, here's how you get it started again:

From the command prompt type (assumming STSADM path is defined in environment variables)

stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicename WSS_Administration -servicetype Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService

Once this command successfully completes, run an IISREST t

How to force a SQL database log file to shrink via SQL Manager UI

I’ve sometimes found that when trying to shrink a SharePoint SQL via the SQL Management interface, the database refuses to shrink, and in some cases even grows!

A colleague showed me an easy fix today which requires a simple (temporary) change to the database options.

Simply follow these steps (but bear in mind that you are following this advice at your own risk)

1. Ensure you have a FULL backup of the database because you will be essentially "breaking" the full transaction log by carrying out this procedure.
2. Right click the database and choose PROPERTIES, then click on Options
3. Change the Recovery Model to ‘Simple
4. Click OK
5. Right click the DB, select Tasks > Shrink > Files
6. Select ‘Log’ under file type
7. Under shrink action, select ‘Reorganize pages…” and then set the new size to shrink the log down to
8. Click OK and your database log file will be resized.
9. Be sure to change the Recovery Model back to ‘FULL’ when completed’

SharePoint menu fly outs down multiple levels

Just stumbled across a (yet another) great post by Heather Solomon entitled How to Activate the Drop Down Menu in MOSS Sites

I don't want to rehash it, but bascially you can have your SharePoint global navigation dyanamically display multi layers of subsites/pages simply by making a change to the masterpage.

Determine size of SharePoint 2007 Site Collection

One way of quickly determining the physical size of a SharePoint 2007 Site collection is to go to Central Admin > Application Management > Site Collection Quotas and Locks and select the site collection you want to check the size of.

At the bottom of the page, just above the OK and Cancel buttons you will see the 'Current Storage Used' value.

No mapping between account names and security ids was done

I came across this error message today when building a virtualised SharePoint/MOSS farm on Windows 2008 with SQL 2008.

When trying to install SQL 2008 and specifying a domain account for the SQL service account,  the installer kept telling me that the credentials were invalid. 

I (temporarily) adding the service account to the local admin group on the SQL server, but the account name did not display.  I tried adding the service account again, only to have windows tell me that the user was already  a member of the group!

I proceeded to spend a couple of hours fiddling with the firewall settings and Kerberos only to have it dawn on me that I had forgotten to SYSPREP the machine before I'd cloned it...

I then went back to the template VM only to find that Sysprep no longer works on Windows 2008.  Apparently, it's been replaced with a new tool which generates the inf via XML.  I downloaded it in haste, discovering that it's designed for Windows images (I'm using Vmware).

Fortunately I remembered that there was another way to "de-identify" the virtual machine....NewSid !  Fortunately it still works on Windows 2008. 

After running it I removed the computer from the Domain and deleted the computer account.  I then rejoined the domain and the SQL installation went smoothly.

Where is Network Places in Vista? I want to create a shortcut to a SharePoint library!

 

My Network Places has been removed in Vista, but you can still create shortcuts to SharePoint libraries and/or document libraries...

1. Open Windows Explorer (Windows Key + E)
2. Right click on any blank space in the right pane (the side which shows you drive(s))
3. Select Add a Network Location

\\SERVER\Share is not accessible. you might not have permission to use this network resource. not enough server storage is available to process....

I've had this nagging problem for a week now on our domain. The shared folder is actually an external USB drive.

Have tried per Microsoft's instructions to increase the IRPStackSize to no avail.
Also tried removing computer from domain and re-adding - no luck.

I then thought back to what I had done to the computer in the past week.

I'd remotely deployed Acronis True Image server and Symantec Corporate Anti-virus.

Out of curiousity, I tired removing the Acronis True Image server and rebooting.

Guess what? The problem went away! Go figure!