OK, so I’ve posted 5 times in the last 2 days on various SharePoint related things. Any regular readers of this blog will know that is entirely out of the ordinary and does not take a genius to determine that I’ve been doing something with SharePoint and, as with most SharePoint projects, I’ve encountered a bunch of issues. The events that have led to these are probably not common but equally something that you will face from time to time. The perfect storm of requirements consist of:

I recently talked about the method for updating the SharePoint passphrase.

Whilst this did ‘work’ I suffered a slightly unfortunate consequence - which may or may not affect you. (I’m guessing if you’re here, then you’re facing a similar issue.)

As part of what I had been doing, I had changed the Farm Account password. I did this in AD and then manually changed the credentials in IIS and Services.msc for e.g., the Timer service and all other places that I thought it needed changing. However, I did NOT change it in Central Admin for the Managed Account itself.

The content organiser is a powerful feature in SharePoint that allows users to upload files to a single central area and then use rules to route the documents to the correct place.

Creating new rules programmatically is simple but what if you want to change the actual settings of the content organiser? Things like ‘require users to use the organiser’, ‘allow rules to specify another site as a target location’ and so on. This is one area where the SharePoint server APIs fall over a little.

Recently I was trying to figure out a way to restore a copy of a site collection to a different location. (Well that’s the short version, anyway, there was a much bigger issue I was trying to resolve.)

One solution was to backup the site collection and restore it to the new location. The site collection itself is a bit of a monster (around 300gb). From Central Administration I tried to use the GUI screen to backup the site collection to a network share.

Yesterday I posted about a quick hack to reset the farm passphrase. Part of this was using the psconfig cli to perform an in-place upgrade of SharePoint.

Part of this was the command:

psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace v2v -passphrase "passphrase" -wait

At the time, all seemed to Ok… but today have noticed that the Manage Database Upgrade Status in Central Admin was showing that some databases had been left behind - “Database is in compatibility range and should be upgraded”. And the output from

Was doing a Service Pack upgrade on a SharePoint installation and hit an unexpected error:

Unable to create a Service Connection Point in the current Active Directory domain. Verify that the SharePoint container exists in the current domain and that you have rights to write to it.
Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The object LDAP://CN=Microsoft SharePoint Products,CN=System,DC=xxx,DC=com doesn’t exist in the directory.

This seemed odd - I’d just completed the same process on a different environment and didn’t hit the same issue. And after checking with one of the domain admins… confirmed that this container does not exist at all. So it seems it’s a spurious issue.

“Jolyon’s at No.10” in Cardiff is everything that’s wrong with ‘boutique hotels’.

There, I’ve said it. Apologies if this sounds like a splenetic, unwarranted rant… and, honestly, it’s not aimed directly at Jolyon’s… the stay itself was fine (other than a few issues as noted later) and the staff were good and attentive. This is aimed more generally at the concept of a boutique hotel, but it just so happens that it was my stay at Jolyon’s that prompted this. Perhaps if they didn’t advertise as being boutique, I wouldn’t be referencing them. But they do, so here we are.

In August 2017 I climbed the West peak of Mt. Elbrus via the South approach. Elbrus is the highest point on the European Continent standing at 5642m and represents the European component of the 7 Summits - a challenge to climb the highest peaks on all 7 continents. It sits in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia and is a stone’s throw from the border with Georgia.

Here’s a quick summary of my experience.

Our tour was organised by Adventure Peaks. We traveled from the UK via Gatwick in to Moscow Sheremevo and then onwards to Mineralnye Vody (MRV). At MRV, we were met by the local travel company who arranged our onward travel via minibus in to the Baksan Valley, which formed our base for the trip.

Just encountered a fun little issue when trying to move something from a local MySQL server to a ‘Prod’ server. The difference in architecture being that dev MySQL was running on OSX whereas the ‘Prod’ MySQL was running on Linux (debian).

The issue was that a lot of my queries/views/procedures were failing on the Linux box due to non-existence of tables. (When they definitely existed.)

The problem was how different operating systems treat case sensitivity in tables. In short, on Windows and OSX table names are case insensitive. In Linux and other Unix based platforms, they are case sensitive.

Last week I posted about the setup of a RPI / Mono. Having played with a little, I’ve ultimately abandoned that line of approach.

This is not directly a reflection on Mono - no doubt the team behind that have done an incredible job of developing a platform well beyond the original intentions of the .NET framework. My main issue was that the application I’d written in a true WinDev environment didn’t just move over to the RPI / Mono environment, thus my dev cycle was broken.