Tech Tips, News and Tribal Knowledge

Well, it’s 6 PM PST and no sign of the ESX 3.5 U2 fix. Maybe I should try one of the suggested workarounds?

1. Do not install ESX 3.5 U2 if it has been downloaded from VMware’s website or elsewhere prior to August 12, 2008.

Hmm.. already installed the patch, guess that won’t work.

2. Set the host time to a date prior to August 12, 2008. This workaround has a number of very serious side affects that could impact product environments.

You better believe there are side effects. If you are synchronizing time with the ESX server Kerberos will complain bitterly if you set the clock back. Oh, and another thing, Exchange 2003 won’t even start as it appears to get its initial time from the host hardware clock at boot.

VMware has released an urgent notification concerning an issue with their “Update 2″ release.  It appears this patch will cause power-on and VMotion failures for some systems.  I thought I’d post the entire text of the notification here in case some readers fail to receive it directly from VMware.

This is a huge foul-up on the part of VMware and will probably damage their credibility for some time to come.  The ability of one update to take down entire server farms will surely hamper adoption of virtualization for production servers across the board.  This is very unfortunate for VMware.

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Recently I experienced some unusual Kerberos authentication issues with one of our SharePoint farms. Users accessing the farm using the Kerberos protocol would receive repeated logon dialog boxes from the front-end server. The prompts would continue even though the user was entering the proper credentials. These repeated logon attempts wouldn’t lock out the user account which indicated the logon never got past the front-end server. This behavior affected only those users authenticating to the farm using Kerberos. Any users authenticating to the farm using the NTLM protocol had no issues logging in. In addition, the following KRB_AP_ERR_MODIFIED error appeared in the event logs:

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After installing SharePoint using the least privileged model, you will undoubtedly find your event logs filled with errors. You will see dozens of 10016, 7888, 6482 and 6398 events all with red the “X”, but don’t despair, you haven’t done anything wrong. If you have followed SharePoint best practices, the accounts you have used for your farm, shared services provider, default content access and application pools are all domain user accounts with no special rights or privileges. When installing MOSS under the least privileged model, these errors are expected. In order to eliminate the errors and finish your install, you need to complete three basic permissioning tasks before calling it a day.

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After previously deriding the pretty permalinks mantra, I have finally decided to drink the “Kool-Aid.”  Although I’m still not convinced it will make any difference in search engine rankings, I do see the value of pretty permalinks in overall site design and organization.  There are two primary reasons I’ve decided to change the default permalink structure, neither of which have anything to do with search engine optimization (SEO).  The first, and most important, concerns how manually entered links back to my blog appear to potential readers.  The second involves the limitations imposed on site hierarchy when using the default permalink structure.

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Recently I was tasked with creating a training environment for new SharePoint site administrators. Since the trainer wanted to create as realistic an experience as possible, the site needed to closely match the production environment. The training session was scheduled to begin in a couple of days, so I didn’t have much time to come up with a workable solution.

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Microsoft has just released updates to both Sharepoint 2007 and Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0.  The update addresses several performance and scalability issues as well as adding new search features such as federated search and a unified search admin dashboard.

Microsoft recommends applying these fixes as soon as possible.

You can find the patches at:

32 bit

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)

Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)

64 bit

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)

Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)

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In Eric Eaton’s post, How do I make our SharePoint site stop asking me to login? – Part II, he discusses several issues that prevent pass-through authentication from SharePoint to Active Directory. While browser settings are a common source of authentication problems, in this post, I’d like to discuss an interesting credential issue related to Kerberos ticket expirations.

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There seems to be near universal agreement among bloggers and search engine optimization (SEO) experts that the default permalink structure in WordPress is not optimal for SEO.  While I don’t know where this belief originated, I do know that a presentation by Matt Cutts at WordCamp 2007 lent further support to this notion.  Matt is on the Google search team and his opinion carries a lot of weight.  Being the suspicious curmudgeon I am, my stated position is: “saying it doesn’t make it so.”

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