Short Tom Blog

Where has “Services on Server” gone?

On my last SharePoint deployment, I came across a very peculiar issue.

When I opened the SharePoint Central Admin (SCA) site, selected the Operations tab and the Services on Server link was missing. when I typed in the URL directly (http://SCA/_admin/Server.aspx) I was prompted with an access denied page. Strange as I had farm administrator permissions??? I also noticed other links were missing, like Outgoing e-mail settings.

Bit of background, the SharePoint environment as all built on Windows Server 2008 R2 with UAC enabled to the highest level, requiring username and password to run all UAC tasks.

So I worked out, I had just opened Internet Explorer and clicked a favourite to SCA rather than via the official Central Admin link (START > Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint 3.0 Central Admin).

This link runs PSCONFIGUI.exe to query the SharePoint Config database to see where the SCA is running and which is a UAC task. opening it via the official Central Admin link gave me all the SCA options again.

SharePoint and URLSCAN just don’t get along

For my Latest SharePoint Extranet deployment, I had a lot of issues with basic SharePoint functionality which I have never had issues with before.

I could only upload a file up to 28MB in size, despite having the file upload limit set to 100MB (following these instructions from Microsoft - KB925083 & KB94481).
Office Integration didn't work (checkout didn’t work and “Edit in Office” opened the document in Read-Only mode, which is pretty useless for a for a collaboration tool).

My SharePoint site was publishing via ISA Server 2006, so made use of persistent cookies to enable the Office integration to work. I had tested this in my test environment and both the file upload limit and office integration worked as expected.

Whilst troubleshooting the issue in the live environment, one of my Colleagues realised a difference in my Test and Live environments. The Live environment web servers had URLSCAN installed. Another one of my Colleagues, tasked with performing server hardening of the live environment, had previously installed URLSCAN on my SharePoint web servers to secure IIS. When I was asked about URLSCAN before it was installed, having not heard of it, I did a quick bit of research which led me to the conclusion it shouldn’t cause any issues. How badly I was wrong :(

To resolve the issue, we removed URLSCAN from the web servers and accepted the risk. The SharePoint file upload and office integration worked as expected.

Lessons Learnt

SharePoint and URLSCAN just don’t get along, without the correct configuration and thought.
Make sure your Test environment exactly matches the configuration of your Live environment.
Take more time to research things you don’t know.

Exception from HRESULT: 0x80041054

Issue

Following a fairly innocent reboot of all my SharePoint farm servers, all SharePoint site content was not displayed and I go the following error message.

Interestingly though, all the content under /_layouts/ was displayed with no issues. This made me think there must have been an issue with the content databases rather than the SharePoint servers themselves.

Reason

After much investigation (crawling through logs and internet searches), I determined (with the help of Matt Groves) that the SharePoint aware anti-virus (Symantec 5.1 for SharePoint) had stopped and left the VirusStatus code for the master page and several page layouts in anti-virus limbo.

When a virus is detected or when the service that connects SharePoint to the antivirus scan engine becomes unavailable, the antivirus scanner sets the VirusStatus code to a non-zero and non-null value. This makes SharePoint believe the files have a virus and won’t display it (pretty disastrous when its the master page!).

The scan engine became unavailable because the temporary licence for the Symantec 5.1 for SharePoint had expired. I believe the reboot stopped the scan engines from running, the license may have expired days or weeks ago.

You may also have an issue if you remove your SharePoint aware anti-virus.

Solution

Run the following SQL Query against your content database(s) to determine if they have have files stuck in AV limbo

SELECT * FROM Docs

WHERE (VirusStatus > 0) AND (VirusStatus IS NOT NULL)

(see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928169 for more detail)

This will return all files which SharePoint believes are viruses.

Enable your SharePoint aware anti-virus (I did this by applying a new license code to all the SharePoint servers). If you’ve uninstalled it, reinstall your AV, fix the content and follow products recommended removal process.
Run a manual AV scan on SharePoint using your SharePoint aware AV.
Run the SQL Query again to make sure no virus items are returned. if they are, run your manual scan again and try and determine if you have a virus.

SharePoint 2007 Visio Shapes

A while back now I created a Visio Stencil full of MOSS 2007 Shapes. I have since added extra shapes. It now includes the following servers, plus the ability to create your own servers from the individual shapes.