Tech Tips, News and Tribal Knowledge

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)

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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The double-hop issue in SharePoint occurs when IIS attempts to pass the user’s NTLM credentials to a service that is running on a server that is either not part of the requesting server’s farm, or not running directly on the web server. A good example of this is a web part that requests data from a SQL server that is not part of the MOSS farm and that SQL server requires the credentials of the user making the request. This type of authentication request is disallowed in .NET. As NTLM authenticates only the client and not the server, there would be no way for the end user to know if their credentials were passed to a valid service. If Microsoft Windows authentication allowed this, a web server could collect user credentials and pass them around at will. This would be a very poor security model. Fortunately, Kerberos authentication provides a workaround for this, but it requires a little more configuration effort.

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SharePoint administrators are often asked to securely publish their sites either to the Internet, internally, or both. This is a fairly straightforward process of configuring your MOSS installation for SSL and publishing your site using any one of the numerous firewalls or proxy servers available on the market. But what happens if your users forget the site is SSL secured and enter http://your.moss.site instead of https://your.moss.site? Well, if you’ve properly secured your site and blocked HTTP traffic from the Internet, they receive the all too familiar 404 page not found error and you get a call asking why the site is down. If they are internal users and enter http://your.moss.site, they receive a 403.4 Forbidden: SSL is required… error.

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After installing the Office Communicator 2007 client you may have two errors indicating that there is a problem with Communicator’s integration with Outlook.

The first error refers to a required hotfix that you can download directly from the link provided in the “Information” dropdown in the Communicator client. Simply select the link in the dropdown and install the patch.

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