MOSS Indexing

Joel Olson has a great blog post on the anatomy of MOSS indexing. Here is an excerpt from his post. When a full crawl is started, then :

• Indexer communicates with a WFE web service, the sitedata.asmx
• Enumerates the URLs and gathers metadata
• With the URLs it issues GETS for the content from the content database to retrieve the page content and subsequent documents and lists

When an incremental crawl is started, then:

• Indexer communicates with a WFE web service sitedata.asmx to read the change log through WSS Object model
• Does enumeration and returns changed/added/deleted URLs and metadata to the indexer
• Indexer issues http GETs to index the relevant content

I can also add a few tips:

• An incremental crawl will go ahead and delete any content it cannot find (even if it was previously found). Be careful about crawl rules being added and deleted. Also check to see if all your pages are working properly or else they will be deleted
• Incremental crawl will index aspx files and all other document types during incremental crawl. It will NOT detect changes to aspx files
• Incremental crawl is very fast compared to a full crawl.
• You can easily run into memory exceptions (specially 'Error in Site Data Web Service: Out of Memory Exception'). This might be because of the number of documents in the library. The only way out can be to reduce the number of documents/migrate to 64 bit (I cannot confirm this statement...Iam still having a simillar problem). You should also try to add Impact rules and change the interval between each request.

Export MOSS Search Settings

For a long time now, I have been looking for a tool to export all my search settings from production to development environment and I thought the only way to do this is through the MOSS backup/restore process. But, there is a tool to do all this for you. You can basically export all your Content Sources, Managed Properties and Scopes using this tool. Check out the tool here:

http://www.codeplex.com/SSSPPC

After 6 months with my IPhone

How does one feel after spending 6 months with his IPhone ? Does he feel really excited to own such an exquisite gadget or does he feel bad for spending approx 500 bucks for a phone which got reduced to 300 after a couple of weeks ? To find out more read on....
- points

• Bad Speakers ...sometimes it really gets on my nerve. When talking on the fone while driving or listening to music you need really good speakers and this is something IPhone doesn't have.
• Battery life...I need to charge it every night or my fone is dead the next morning.
• Browser crash...Quite often the browser crashes or responds too slowly.
• No video camera.
• Cannot create custom apps without hacking it.....Creating our own apps would have been a great feature if available.

+ points

• Now having mentioned the - points, the + points would be a long one starting with an excellent design making you will love it instantly. You cannot stop showing it your friends, co-workers and to others...
• Google Maps.
• Watching youtube videos without switching on your laptop.
• Browsing internet and accessing your email from anywhere and anytime .
• Google has been really good in developing applications customized to iphone and these really help using it.
• Tracking your voicemail and sms from a particular caller....This is quite different from other phones.

I have not mentioned anything about the ipod features in an IPhone because this in not something I use everyday. I use my iphone as a music player probably a couple of times a week but mostly it ends up being my fone.
It has been very good to me even though I dropped and abused it a couple of times. I cannot imagine waking up one day and not finding my IPhone next to me. It greets me with an alarm every morning, gets me the latest news, shows my calender, gets my email and all this happens without you getting out from your bed. Don't you think this is enough to own an IPhone ?

Later,
Prashanth

AIM 6.5 on Vista with UAC turned off

Today, one of the users complained about wireless not working, the Network Sharing center taking ever to load and Remote Desktop not working. I checked the services and most of them were not started. I tried to start the Network List service but it was throwing an error:

"Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service"

I tried googling and the following came up:

http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/showpost.aspx?postid=2326150&siteid=17&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=0

The posts were explaining exactly what I was facing. AIM 6.5 was causing a problem, but the user had installed AIM long time back and the problem started occuring recently. I uninstalled AIM, but it had no effect. The following steps solved the issue:

• After uninstalling AIM, I turned on UAC
• Restarted the system
• Installed AIM and it started to work

You have to install AIM again to get the wireless and the rest of the stuff to work. Just uninstalling AIM and turning on UAC will NOT fix the problem.

MacBook Air

Check out the Macbook Air Ad here:



Also, check out the parody to the above one:

TechEd 2008

Registration for TechEd 2008 has opened and if you register before April 2008, you can save 200$. They have two tracks :

• Tech·Ed U.S. 2008 Developers
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You will get to know more about the unreleased, state of the art technologies and also spend some really good time in Orlando, Florida.

Hosts file getting deleted

Today, I modified the search indexer to point to a seperate wfe server instead of crawling all the wfe's. Once I modifed the setting, the following error started throwing up in the eventviewer:

Reason: Could not find file 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS'.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office SharePoint Server
Event Category: Office Server Shared Services Event ID: 6482
Date: 1/19/2008
Time: 6:12:03 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ******************
Description:Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance Reason: Access to the path 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS' is denied.
Techinal Support Details:
System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS' is denied. at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath) at System.IO.FileStream.Init(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, Int32 rights, Boolean useRights, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secAttrs, String msgPath, Boolean bFromProxy) at System.IO.FileStream..ctor(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options) at System.IO.StreamWriter.CreateFile(String path, Boolean append) at System.IO.StreamWriter..ctor(String path, Boolean append, Encoding encoding, Int32 bufferSize) at System.IO.StreamWriter..ctor(String path, Boolean append) at System.IO.FileInfo.CreateText() at Microsoft.Search.Administration.Security.HOSTSFile.CleanupDedicatedGathering(Hashtable HOSTSFileMappings, StringBuilder HOSTSComments, IEnumerable obsoleteHosts, String dedicatedName, Boolean isDirty) at Microsoft.Search.Administration.Security.HOSTSFile.ConfigureDedicatedGathering(SearchServiceInstance searchServiceInstance, SPServer dedicatedWebFrontEndServer, IList`1 previousWebApplicationHostNames) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.SynchronizeDefaultContentSource(IDictionary applications) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.Synchronize() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)

The above error shows up because the Sharepoint Timer job actually deletes the hosts file after you modify the wfe the crawler has to point to. I had taken a backup of file and I went ahead and restored it. But after restoring it back, the following error throws up in the eventviewer:

Reason: Access to the path 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS' is denied.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office SharePoint Server
Event Category: Office Server Shared Services
Event ID: 6482
Date: 1/19/2008
Time: 6:22:50 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ******************
Description:Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance
Reason: Access to the path 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS' is denied.
Techinal Support Details:System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS' is denied. at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath) at System.IO.FileInfo.Delete() at Microsoft.Search.Administration.Security.HOSTSFile.CleanupDedicatedGathering(Hashtable HOSTSFileMappings, StringBuilder HOSTSComments, IEnumerable obsoleteHosts, String dedicatedName, Boolean isDirty) at Microsoft.Search.Administration.Security.HOSTSFile.ConfigureDedicatedGathering(SearchServiceInstance searchServiceInstance, SPServer dedicatedWebFrontEndServer, IList`1 previousWebApplicationHostNames) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.SynchronizeDefaultContentSource(IDictionary applications) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.Synchronize() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)

The following permissions need to be given to c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc folder for the wss_admin_wpg account :

• Traverse Folder / Execute File
• List Folder / Read Data
• Read Attributes
• Read Extended Attributes
• Create Files / Write Data
• Read Permissions
• Delete Permissions ( I will explain this .....)

The delete permission also needs to be given because the timer job actually deletes and recreates the hosts file. I was a bit hesitant to give this but had to do so to get it to work. After the permissions are given, I did not see any other errors in the eventlog

Later..