MOSS 2007 Feb CU 2011 has a lot of fixes which pursued us to get it in our SharePoint farm but eventually it led into a nightmare when the configuration wizard started failing on the web servers. Here is what happened. We installed Feb CU 2011 in our SharePoint farm. The binaries installed successfully. The configuration wizard ran successfully on the index and query server but failed on the web servers. On the web servers, the configuration wizard failed at step 8. Even after trying with the ... [More]

Here are the steps to move a site collection (from within a web application) to a different content source. This process has its own pros and cons and you should analyze the impact before deciding to do this step. Scenario:You have one content source (Local Office SharePoint Server sites) with two web application configured inside it (http://webapplication1.com, http://webapplication2.com). You need to move one site collection from this webapplication1 to a different content source so that you ... [More]

Troubleshooting SharePoint performance issue is a daunting task. There are various logs that need to be analyzed and correlated to come to a conclusion. Sometimes an observation in one log can lead to verification in other logs along the same time. Performance counters play a vital role during performance investigation. Performance counters logs contain various data over a period of time and provides a snapshot on the resource consumption during the period.   It is very important to coll... [More]

SharePoint does not provide an option to export crawl logs from the Search crawl. The following set of queries can be executed in the database to export the list of errors from the crawl logs. select * from MSSCrawlErrorList with (nolock)This query will return the different types of error that can be generated by the search crawl. Keep a note of the ErrorID for the error that you want to exportExample: ErrorID 692 is for "The crawler could not communicate with the server. Check that the server... [More]

The incremental process is dependent on the protocol handler being used. We will first attempt to get changes from the last crawl.  We do this through MSDMN.exe process and hit a webservice called sitedatawebservice.  The URL is: http://servername/_vti_bin/sitedata.asmx How to detect changes before starting incremental crawl: This can all be accomplished by a series of SQL queries. The first table you need to check is the MSSChangeLogCookies table within the Search database. This ta... [More]

Log parser queries for NetMon [More]

Log parser queries for IIS Logs [More]

List of different queries that can be run on a SharePoint database [More]

The article contains the meaning of the values that are used int the user profile filters. [More]

User profile import started throwing error all of a sudden. Be it either full or incremental, it always ends up with the following error in the crawl log. This item could not be crawled because the repository did not respond within the specified timeout period. Try to crawl the repository at a later time, or increase the timeout value on the Proxy and Timeout page in search administration. You might also want to crawl this repository during off-peak usage times. OR The server is unavailable... [More]