STSADM find

There is an option in STSADM command line to find out the list of stsadm commands related to feature or solution or contentdb etc. Its something like, for example you want to find out what are the stsamd commands used for features...like activatefeature, installfeature etc....

Go to the path where you can run the stsadm command...i.e. in the BIN folder.

type

stsadm | find "feature"

You will get all the stsadm commands related to feature.... as shown in the screenshot below.

To determine the version of MOSS installed

There are few ways in which you can check the verison of the MOSS installed on the machine. They are -

1> Go to Central Administration Page. Click on Operations tab. Then click on "Servers in the farm" link. There the version should be available.
2> Its also visible in the site settings page of the Central Administration i.e. http://centraladminURL:portnumber/_layouts/settings.aspx.
3> Also you can run the below query on the Config database.
SELECT [VersionId],[Version],[Id],[UserName],[TimeStamp],
[FinalizeTimeStamp],[Mode],[ModeStack],[Updates],[Notes]
FROM
[SharePoint_Config].[dbo].[Versions]
WHERE VersionId = '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'
ORDER BY [Id]
DESC

Hosting Sharepoint Central Admin page on all the WFEs

Hosting a Central Admin (CA) page on all theWFEs, gives you advantage of accessing it even though if one of the WFE is down or switched off.

Steps to be taken for hosting CA on all WFEs.

1> While configuring MOSS, the configuration wizard asks whether to host the CA page on the WFE. Please go ahead and provide the port number. It will mention in the end, the URL of the CA page. Let's suppose the URL of the CA page when there is one WFE server (\\wfeserver1 ) and database server (\\dbserver ) on a port 8888 be http://wfeserver1:8888 . Verify if this URL comes up properly.
2> Go to the other WFE (\\wfeserver2 ). Again, while configuring the wizard, select "connect to existing farm" and finally would ask if the CA will be hosted on this machine. Select to proceed creating the CA page on the WFE. Finally the URL of the CA page would be http://wfeserver2:8888 . Please note that we select the same port on both the cases. Also check if the CA URL http://wfeserver2:8888 is accessible or not.

*** If we do select "This machine will not host the CA page" , then whenever we type http://wfeserver2:8888 it will automatically redirect to http://wfeserver1:8888 . So it depends on how you want to access your CA page.
3> Now once the CA page is up, Go to Operations Tab. In Global Configuraton section Click on the Alternate Access Mappings. Now Click on alternate access mapping collection and select the Central Administration. Then click on Edit Public URLs. Lets suppose you want to access the CA page with a common URL like http://wfeserver:8888 and not with http://wfeserver1:8888 or http://wfeserver2:8888 . Then in default, add http://wfeserver:8888 , in intranet you can add http://wfeserver1:8888 and in custom you provide http://wfeserver2:8888 .

This also does the load balancing for the CA page. Also if any of the WFE goes down, then you can directly access the CA URL of the server which is not down.

Learn Powershell !! The Next Big Thing.......

Powershell is basically a scripting language. It is an Object Oriented Programming language and interactive command line shell for Microsoft Windows. This scripting language can be used for various tasks like -
1> System administration
2> Automation of tasks.
3> allows you to work on Active Directory, Exchange Server, Windows Servers, SQL servers, Sharepoint Servers and other Microsoft Office Suites.
It involves and integrates with .NET environment and can also embed into other applications with ease.
Below are the few links which you should try if you want to learn powershell.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx
http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/
http://powergui.org/

PowerGUI.org gives you a UI based powershell scripting environment with Intellisense that makes scripting more enjoiable rather than seeing a broing blue screen command prompt.

I started using powershell recently and have adapted to it very quickly provided my very less exposure to hard core coding.
I had installed the Powershell Script Editor from PowerGUI.org and wnet through the ebook present in http://powershell.com/ .

With these two in your hand, you are ready to rock and roll POWERSHELL.. Happy Learning... :)

Access is denied error when crawling a MOSS content

When we try to crawl a content souce of sharepoint site we sometimes come across the error "Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)" as shown in the screenshot below.

To get rid of this error, follow the below steps..

1.Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2.In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3.Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4.Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5.Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6.In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7.Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

Please do the same on all the WFEs of the sharepoint farm.

Once done, kindly start the full crawling. This runs without any issues!!!

Adding PDF icon in Sharepoint

Follow the steps as mentioned below to get the PDF icon working in a sharepoint site.
1> Stop the IIS.
2> Install the Adobe IFilter from the below links -
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=2611 for 32 bit
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025 for 64 bit
3> Then copy/add the icon of the pdf to "c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES"
4> Then go to "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML" and edit the DOCICON.XML
5> Add the key that is mentioned below inside the above XML file.

6> Restart the IIS.
7> Then go to Central Administration page to add the file type. Go to the SSP, then click on File types list.
8> Click on new file type. Type in PDF, then click OK.

Finally, you get to see the pdf icons for the PDF files that you have uploaded on the sharepoint site.