Alexander’s Blog

The Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit contains functionality to help administrate and manage Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services version (WSS) 3.0. This toolkit contains the ability to diagnose performance issues, perform bulk operations on site collections, an Stsadm operation to update alert e-mails after the URL for a Web application has been changed, and a User Profile Replication Engine tool.

You must have either MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 installed. The supported operating systems include Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; and Windows XP. Also, if you have version 1.0 or 2.0 of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit installed, Microsoft recommends that you uninstall the older versions before installing this version 3.0.

To download the 64-bit version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit, click here.

To download the 32-bit version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit, click here.

Have you run into a situation where you try to access your USB hard drive and get the following error:

E: is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect.

where E: is the drive letter of your external USB hard disk.

You may also get the access is denied error. The drive remains inaccessible even if you try to hook it up to other computers.

A friend of mine ran into this situation and got a quote of $500-$800 from various local data recovery companies in the Seattle area. When she brought the 3.5″ external 320GB Seagate USB drive to me as a last ditch effort before coughing up hundreds of dollars, the first thing I did was connect to my Windows 7 computer to see what kind of error I would get. I was able to see the drive but got the Access is denied error. I decided to use the CHKDSK utility. I figured if that didn’t work then I will look into using some software that can possibly repair the drive because I assumed there were lost clusters, or other disk errors that were making the drive unreadable.

I ran CHKDSK G: /F /R /X, where G: was the drive letter for the USB external drive on my computer.

/F fixes the error on the disk

/R Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information

/X Forces the volume to dismount if necessary

You could also run CHKDSK without the /F parameter to see if there are corrupted files before fixing them. Then you can run CHKDSK with /F parameter to actually fix the lost clusters, along with /R parameter to locate the bad sector and recover readable information from the hard disk.

It took several hours but luckily CHKDSK found about 1.6GB of data in over 5000 recovered files. I let CHKDSK convert the lost chains to files , fix cross-linked files by copying them to other locations, and rename the duplicate files in the folders. I was able to recover almost all of the data (about 5oGB, with over 40,000 files), except for 8 files. I reformatted the drive with NTFS, which is much more reliable and secure file system than the original FAT32.

My students often ask about the common port numbers that they need to know for Microsoft certification exams. A lot depends on the exam you are taking. For example, for Active Directory exam it will be helpful to k now the ports that Active Directory uses. For Exchange, the ports that are used by Exchange, etc. , In general, here are some of the common port  numbers that are good to know. For a more detailed list check out the article TCP/IP Port Numbers.

TCP 20 FTP (File Transfer Protocol – Data)

TCP 21 FTP (File Transfer Protocol – Control)

TCP 22 SSH (Secure Shell – Remote login protocol)

TCP 23 Telnet

TCP 25 SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)

TCP 53 DNS (Domain Name System)

TCP 67 BOOTPS (Bootstrap Protocol Server)

TCP 68 BOOTPC (Bootstrap Protocol Client)

TCP 80 HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol)

TCP 88 Kerberos

TCO 110 POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3)

TCP 119 NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol)

TCP 123 NTP (Network Time Protocol)

TCP 137 NetBIOS (NETBIOS Name Service)

TCP 138 NetBIOS (NETBIOS Datagram Service)

TCP 139 NetBIOS (NETBIOS Session Service)

TCP 143 IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol)

TCP 161 SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

TCP 389 LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)

TCP 443 HTTPS (HTTP secure – used for SSL)

A lot of SharePoint Administrators like to hide the View All Site Content link on certain SharePoint sites. Microsoft’s Mark Wagner has a solution on his blog that works really well. It removes the View All Site Content link and add it to the Site Actions menu. If the user knows the URL he/she can still get to View All Site Content, so this is not considered a security solution, it simply hides it from the users.

The solution doesn’t need any special coding and works with WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. The nice thing about this solution is that you don’t need to mess with the Master page, which can potentially be problematic.

Here are the basic steps. For additional details you might want to check out Mark Wagner’s blog.

1. Download this Hide View All Site Content – Solution Package.

2. Copy the package to a folder and extract the zip file.

3. Add the solution to SharePoint site by using the following command:

stsadm -o addsolution -filename [path]\VASCSiteAction.wsp

e.g. stsadm -o addsolution -filename c:\utils\VASCSiteAction.wsp

You should see the message “Operation completed successfully.”

4. Next you need to deploy the solution by using the following command:

stsadm -o deploysolution -name VASCSiteAction.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -allcontenturls

You should see the message “Timer job successfully created.”

5. You can optionally run iisreset/noforce, although it should work without running iisireset.

6. Go to the site where you want to hide the View All Site Content link.

7. Go to Site Actions, Site Settings and click Site features under Site Administration.

Warning! Make sure you click  Site Features under Site Administration as shown below and not the Site Collection Features under Site Collection Administration.

8. Activate the new feature called “Hide the View All Site Content link.”

Your View All Site Content link should no longer be visible in the browser.

Have you run into a situation where you try to logon to a SharePoint site in Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox and get no error, yet the page still shows the Sign In link, instead of Welcome SHAREPOINT\username? And you can’t edit the pages because the browser doesn’t think you are logged on. Here’s what I did to fix the problem.

I started Internet Explorer and went to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced tab. I unchecked the box “Enable Integrated Windows Authentication.” That allowed me to properly get authenticated and I was able to edit my SharePoint site both in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (you may have to refresh the screen).