Tag: Sharepoint 2003

SharePoint 2003 Site Restore Fun

Posted by Emil Swenson – April 14, 2008

When I run backups on SharePoint, I do both database backups and individual site backups via a script utilizing the stsadm.exe tool. This gives me the opportunity to both be able to be granular in my restores and also be ready for a disaster scenario.

Today I had to restore a whole site from a .dat file. Simple enough, right? Fire up stsadm and type:

stsadm -o restore -url http://path/to/site -filename e:\backup\path\of\file.dat -overwrite

At first everything seemed like it will be fine. Since this is a command line utility, I didn’t have a progress bar to give me hope, but I was sure of the process and of the outcome; or so I thought…

After 4-5 hours of waiting for the restore to finish, the SharePoint portal went down. The reason was a complete re-crawl of the ENTIRE portal and non-portal data. This kind of thing is done at night and on weekends for a reason! Why did I wait 5 hours? Well, the site in question was 10GB in size. The biggest restore I did up to that point was during off hours and of a 500MB site.

There is no clear cut answer to this on SharePoint 2003. I tried stopping the search service, but this didn’t stop the re-crawl. The solution ended up being desperate–a reboot. I had backups for all the data in case the worst happened. So I rebooted and I waited. The server came back online and after taking around 45 minutes to recheck the databases, it finally settled down and became accessible to everyone. In addition to this, the site restore I was doing also turned out to be successful.

The moral of the story in my case is not to trust SharePoint 2003 with anything. It’s a decent piece of software and 2007 is even better. It just always seems to do things just a bit off of what a person would expect–enough to get you in hot water.

SharePoint Services 2.0 SP3 Disaster

Posted by Emil Swenson – April 8, 2008

If you have a SharePoint 2.0 server and you have installed SharePoint Services 2.0 SP3, you may have notices a few issues. Among the several issues with the service part there are two which stand out.

1. Data view web parts cause users with access to SharePoint sites to be denied access. When users attempt to access sites, they receive an authentication prompt, which fails after being filled out with correct information. The quick workaround for this issue is adding users to the local Administrators group. This was the best (so to speak) solution to this problem before a hotfix was released.

2. The edit in datasheet View feature in lists does not work correctly. It redirects the users back to the standard view. The fix for this issue was quickly released by the community, and later corrected by Microsoft via a hotfix.

The above issues are addressed in hotfixes 948919 and 941412. You will need to fill out a request for these hotfixes.

IMPORTANT: When you apply the fix for issue 1, an immediate rebuild of your portal and non-portal content will follow. On some setups this is known to slow down normal SharePoint access to a crawl. Always backup your SharePoint database before applying hotfixes.