Feverish Activity

At critical levels of activity, humans with heads and chickens without them are virtually indistinguishable.

WSS 3.0 Search Problem

Warning to non-ubergeeks: Here we go again.

Our Windows SharePoint Services server faith5 was not yielding any search results, so I checked logs and found this error:

Retry of query machine ‘FAITH5′ has failed with error: The system cannot find the file specified. 0×80070002. It will be retried again in 30 seconds. Component: d7211c6d-9cab-4268-81f7-5ef3c8455bf8

Searching for numerous queries produced nothing.  I finally found the following information from someone who apparently had the same problem…in Czech Republic:

O lala. Tak jsem si s tím trochu pohrál a pustil jsem se do toho “po administrátorsku”. ) Odisnstalovat jsem tu vyhledávací službu příkazem:

stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action stop

a znova ji nainsaloval:stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action start

Následně jsem jí přes Centrální správu nastavil uživatelské přístupy. Nicméně výsledek byl stejný. Stále stejná chyba. Kouknul jsem se teda na stav služby přes příkaz:

stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action list

a zjistil jsem, že v databázích obsahu indexovaných serverem mám pouze databázi SharePoint_AdminConted_[sid] a vůbec tam není databáze obsahu. Přidal jsem jí tam tedy zadáním příkazu:stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action attachcontentdatabase -databasename WSS_Content

Po zadání tohoto příkazu chyba zmizela a vyhledávání začalo fungovat. Bohužel ale s tím, že se nic nenacházelo. Výsledek vyhledávání byly včdycky prázdný. Došlo mi, že asi není zindexovaná vyhledávací databáze. Spustil jsem tedy příkaz:
stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart

a hle, po chvíli hledání fungovalo a začalo vyhledávat. Hurá! Hurá!

Takže zatím to běží, jsem zvědav jak dlouho to vydrží. Uvidíme zítra. ) [Source]

I said “apparently” for I know nothing of Czech.  It wasn’t offered in my high-school as a language elective.  But this guy definitely made progress (note the smiley faces, and “Hurá!” looks suspiciously exuberant).  After wishing for an available Babelfish and backing up the WSS database, I launched my expedition into the world of WSS search recovery.

Based on the commands listed, I decided to start with stopping the service and trying a restart.  I checked here for stsadm.exe location.  “stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action stop” actually uninstalled the search function on faith5, which I expected from my earlier pokings.  “stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action start” threw an error, so I was ready for more info, in English preferably.  This discussion on Microsoft.com communities was the final link I needed to restart the search service and attach it to our MSDE (SQL Server Express Edition) database.  Back to my Czech friend for the “stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart” command, and we’re in business!

Thanks, axl! Here’s my Czech rescuer’s avatar:

All quiet on the home front!

/ubergeek

Adams on Scientific Method & the Internet

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat.

I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of storeys away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys. Eventually he figured out, ‘Hang on, there’s a chip in there and I’m on a computer and there’s a network running around the building, so why don’t I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want and tell if I’m going to have a wasted journey or not?’ So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet—so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine. Now that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because in the chip in the machine didn’t just say, ‘The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty’ but had all sorts of information; it said, ‘There are 7 Cokes and 3 Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that’. There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their 50 cents in and not pressed the button, i.e. if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, ‘bang!’ — there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? — well obviously somebody 5,000 miles away!

Douglas N. Adams [Source]

“Parallel” SATA drives

Warning to non-ubergeeks: Read at your own risk. Warning to ubergeeks: Nothing earthshaking here.

At work I was running Windows XP Pro 32-bit on a 64-bit capable processor, so when my OS began to drag during publications, web and design work, I decided to install Windows XP Pro x64 for a test run. I installed x64 on a separate SATA drive in another x64 box, then swapped the drive when ready to activate Windows. Charmed.

At that point I had two separate SATA drives, one partitioned in two (between my data and Windows XP x32), the other solely Windows XP x64. I wanted to fasten the drives in place and choose a boot selection on startup, using boot.ini for Windows XP. The problem was that as boot drives they had both been SATA channel 0, as in

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)¹

in boot.ini. Adding a line for

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)

didn’t work. Windows XP x64 wasn’t prepared to look for system files in rdisk(1). Switching the SATA cables (and thus channels) worked, but that meant changing physical cables any time I wanted to boot to the other drive. All the how-tos I could find on the web said, “Don’t mess with drive letters on system drives.”² Ok.

After saving a Norton Ghost image of my x64 drive, I ran a nondestructive system reinstallation on the Windows XP x64 drive, set as multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1). The reinstallation found my Windows XP x32 installation and added that boot drive to my x64 boot.ini. On restart my system booted to rdisk(1), which contained the Windows XP x64 installation. All applications loaded fine. Windows XP x64 loads as drive C, the rdisk(0) OS partition is D and data partition is E.

A quick check of boot options (My Computer | Properties | Advanced | Startup & Recovery) showed that the system was waiting 1 second for OS selection, why I had missed it earlier. Windows XP x32 loads as drive C, data as D, and the rdisk(1) OS drive is F.

The computer is now dual-boot with Windows XP x32 and Windows XP x64, all my apps & docs intact in both drives. I’m pondering running a virtual computer on top of both so I can access my Office apps as needed from either. So far I haven’t, although saved virtual computers will run equally on Virtual PC 2007 x32 and x64. I do have a virtual XP computer running Office 2003 (not 2007) for demo and testing purposes, but I don’t think I want my emails and documents quite that vaporous…yet.

To ubergeeks: Are there faster ways to do what I wanted? Was “the road less traveled by” avoided for cause?

/ubergeek

Band of Seven

We stood in the cold, the seven of us, the chilly spring breezes swirling around us. We heard the traffic on Main Street. The churches around the Diamond—the Baptist church, the “Stone Church,” the Episcopalian church, the Unitarian church—stood silent on the square. There were people in those churches, seeking God, seeking Truth, seeking Righteousness, seeking Reconciliation.

We stood and prayed in their midst. We prayed that those seekers would find what they sought.

We prayed that God would be lifted up, and as he promised, he would draw all men to him. We prayed that the day might come soon that every knee would bow and declare Jesus as Lord. We prayed for integrity as men, that we would never bring shame to the name of Christ.

And we prayed that those who were not seeking in church would be drawn by the love and lives of the disciples.

The heart of God is touched when men pray. God will answer. How? Well, that is another story.

JR2

Re-emergence

After two weeks of obscurity, the stylus returns to a joyous homecoming.

Funny, Patrick McManus warned of the dangerous “black-hole effect” of kitchen tables and car roofs, but he never mentioned the similar power of living-room couches.

Tech Boy

I installed a new DVD/CD-RW drive in my laptop several weeks ago to replace my DVD drive that was kaput.

Now the new DVD/CD-RW drive is kaput.

Ever hear about the disc jockeys’ expression about putting a few nickels on a record to improve its sound?  I think my son Aarick is a little behind his time.

Home Server

 

My invitation.

Very cool.

Errors, Reloaded

Somehow I hate to admit that the same company is responsible for my frustration and my relief.

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