Recently we had an issue with one of our farms, were adding a new content DB using stsadm –o addcontentdb threw the message:

Procedure or function ‘proc_SetDatabaseInformation’ expects parameter ‘@Value’, which was not supplied.

The database did get attached and we ignored the message. Later when performing basic site operations, like adding a site collection administrator etc we started getting ‘Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040E14’

When we check the stored procedures, they two were different from the DB’s which were previously attached to the web application.

We opened a case with Microsoft and found that:

Under the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\SQL\ the below files were different across the farm:

1. STORE.SQL
2. STOREUP.SQL
3. STOREUPDDL.SQL

We took a backup of these files and then replaced them with the files from other web front end servers which had new version.

After replacing these files with the latest version, we are now able to attach new content database without any issues.

In Test farms, operations like detaching databases are common. Central Administration giving a 404 page is a sign of content database being detached.

Even if the content db hosting central administration is detached, you would still be able to run stsadm commands. To verify the database attached to the central administration application use the below command

stsadm.exe -o enumcontentdbs –url <http://centraladminURL:port>

You can identify the content database by connecting through SQL Management studio – it will have a name like ‘Sharepoint_AdminContent_<GUID>’

In this scenario adding contentdb through stsadm -o addcontentdb will result in ‘Access Denied’ error.

This will happen even if you are using the service account and even if it is part of local administrator. The way to correct this is by using:

Stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin <Domain\account> -password <password>

While this command will give a message like “The site http://<http://centraladminURL:port> could not be found in the Web application SPAdministrationWebApplication Parent=SPWebService Name=WSS_Administration”.

You will now be able to add the CA contentdb.

Sharepoint site in browser connects to the web front end server which retrieves content from the SQL server and returns it to the browser. Certain types of files can be cached on the WFE servers so that they need not be retrieved from the SQL Server every time. This has huge performance benefit especially in case large media files.

Blob caching also allows to specify caching related headers for HTTP response from the server, which can control the caching on the browser side. This setting too reduces the number of requests on the server and improves performance.

Implementation:

While the blob caching is disabled by default, a simple change in the web.config of any web application can turn on the blob cache.

<BlobCache location="E:\blobCache" path="\.( gif|jpg|jpeg|jpe|bmp|ico|png|css|js|asf|avi|flv|m4v|mov|mp3|mp4|mpeg|mpg|wmv)$" maxSize="10" enabled="true" max-age="14400" />

Here the maxSize is the size in GB, by default the extensions are fewer and the enabled is set to false. Max-age is the parameter which tells the browser to use the local cache of the browser for the specified seconds.

So in the above example where the max-age is set to 14400, it tells the browser to use its local cache of the image files for the next four hours, only then check for changes to the image. This is highly beneficial when roll over images are implemented and by default every change causes a 304 request. This is because without the default value of max-age is 0 when blobcache is disabled. With max-age set to zero browser checks with the server if the image has changed during every load of the image.

One word of caution – we have seen Blob cache to not work well with web applications have a huge number of site collections. This is because of the internal checks it has to make with every site collections which has cached images. I would not recommend to use blob caching for any web application housing more than 5000 site collections.

Below powershell script can be used to send email with file attachment, it can also be scheduled as discussed in my last post: Schedule execution of Powershell Script

$filename = “C:\Folder\File.log”
$smtpServer = “SMTPServer.Domain.COM”

$msg = new-object Net.Mail.MailMessage
$attach = new-object Net.Mail.Attachment($filename)
$smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)

$msg.From = “rajiv.dattani@onenote.us”
$msg.To.Add(“author@onenote.us”)
$msg.Subject = Get-Date -format d
$msg.Body = “Content of email”
$msg.Attachments.Add($attach)

$smtp.Send($msg)

Powershell script can be scheduled to run from a batch file by using the below command syntax

powershell -command "& {C:\Folder\Script.ps1 }"

i.e. this command can be saved as a “.bat” file and can be scheduled from Windows Scheduled Tasks

In Sharepoint 2007 when deleting subsites you may see an error message like below:

“Error deleting Web site "/sites/test". You can’t delete a site that has subsites.   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.DeleteWeb(String bstrUrl)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.DeleteWeb(String bstrUrl)”

You will get the same error even by using the stsadm command deleteweb

“Error deleting Web site "/sites/ecftest/rajiv3/one". You can’t delete a site that has subsites”

The way to delete the such site is using the stsadm extensions which can be downloaded from link, then use the command

stsadm -o gl-deleteweb2 -url http://abc.domain.com/sites/test -recurse