Exchange 2010 with (generic) Load Balancer (Sike, it’s an F5 VE) and Authentication Gateway Part 2

So picking up pretty close to where I left off, I had to do some reboots, downloaded some updates and fired up the Exchange Management Console.

At this point I want to put in my product key. I’m not going to share it, so get your own.

You can find the location to enter the key on the right task menu in the middle.

Exchange 2010 with (generic) Load Balancer (Sike, it’s an F5 VE) and Authentication Gateway Part 1

OK, so it’s been a while since I posted a deployment guide, and I thought it was time to post something so… here it is.

The first think you are going to want to do is make sure you have a 2008 R2 domain stood up. There are tricks to deploy everything on a single box/vm, but then you aren’t really testing a valid environment are you?

Next, you are going to want to deploy a fresh Windows 2008 R2 Server with a decent sized hard drive. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I don’t generally care about best practice when deploying in my development & testing environments. If you are deploying a production system and following this guide, you are wrong.

CAC Authentication in TMG for SharePoint 2010

Why I like Virtual Box better… (For personal use, and for Linux)

As most IT nerds should know, you need to stay on top of your game to stay relevant in the industry. The best way to do that on a budget is to virtualize. It’s also a good practice for development so that you can sandbox your code, take snapshots, rollback, etc.

I have been working with virtual technology for years because it allowed me to stand up environments quickly on whatever systems I had available. In more recent years however, everything became 64bit. The systems I used couldn’t handle the requirements to virtualize all the cool new stuff out there. And then I found a free solution that works awesome. I have blogged about Virtual Box in the past, but I wanted to go over some things that have come up recently.

There was a requirement for a client to stand up some pretty beefy 64 bit *nix based servers with all the bells and whistles. Now using server based virtualization for these is no big deal, VM Ware and HyperV handle 64 bit no problem. HOWEVER, the integration services on HyperV are not the greatest. Now there are the tweaks to make internal drivers work well, but the whole mouse stuck in the window, hitting cntrl-alt-left (which on my systems always flips the monitor orientation rather than release the mouse) gets to be a pain. Details on Ubuntu drivers in HyperV below, made copy and paste-able (tested on Natty Narwal).

SharePoint 2007 ReGhosting Tool code posted

I found a bunch of broken trails to other reghosting stsadm wrappers and tools, so I figured I would just write one up real quick and make something available again.  Its what I do…

So check it out, its quick, its simple, it works…  It has been tested in some client production environments already.  Specifically meant to be used after an upgrade / migration from 2003 to 2007 to reset all sites / pages to site definition. You lose customizations and stuff, but they are probably broken anyway, so get rid of them and get things working.

http://reghost.codeplex.com/

SharePoint 2010 Custom Login Forms

Thats right, I did it.  Read the 800 blogs out there on how to configure and set up FBA, and then look at your ugly new login screen.  OR, check out my new project on codeplex.

http://mc2010auth.codeplex.com

The master page and CSS are ‘borrowed’ from a wordpress theme that was used on the original requesting clients site, and it should be fairly configurable to just allow changing the CSS out to whatever theme you like from wordpress.  Why?  Because there are a ton of free wordpress themes, but the .NET guys are more stingy with open source design.  (it could be because in WordPress there are only a few 100 classes, and in SharePoint there are a 10’s of 1000’s, but whatever).

Get it, use it, add some more, love it.

You’re welcome.

All your backups are belong to ME.

Alright people, lets lay it out there. SharePoint comes with some recovery features built right in, out of the box. You don’t even have to turn it on or configure it and its still there… You have a two layer recycle bin in every site collection. The settings are based on time and size. If a user deletes a document or every document in January, it might get kicked to the 2^nd stage in February. Then, as long as you don’t hit the right size limit on your site / recycle bin, the document will sit around in the 2^nd stage recycle bin forever.

So why are people spending a ton of money on backup agents and storage / tapes to do brick level backups for 1 year at a time? Who knows? Why let content databases get to 100gigs and rely on SQL backups? Who knows? Here is the problem. Have you ever done a recovery? Have you done one of all of the possible recovery options? I have, and they all suck. That is a technical term for it sucks. Why you ask? Let me count the ways… (Note: Do not take any of this to mean not to do as many backups as possible in order to cover your own butt, I do use SQL, but its reserved for DR type scenarios and not day to day recovery’s.)

• SQL Backups (depending on the DB size) can take hours, especially if you do them to tape (disk is faster, mo’ better).
• SQL Restores (regardless of DB Size) can take hours, especially if you need to pull from tapes, index, catalogue, restore, attach, etc.
  • This can get to be even worse if you don’t need to recover all sites in the content DB, just a single site or a single document. Then you need to recover to a new location or new server, attach the database, create a new web application so you don’t jack up your managed paths, etc.
• SharePoint backup agents are a pain to get working, and then are they even really necessary? Do you need to take snapshots of the content that can be recovered from itself every night? Every week? Maybe once a month would be cool…

I just did a quick comparison of storage requirements, transfer times, and backup methods on a client’s environment. I compared the scripts output that I will share in a minute to Full SQL backups.

	FULL SQL Backup	Michael Script Backup
WSS_Content_DB1	28,181,080 KB	128,065 KB 50,658 KB 49,836 KB 11,352 KB 10,346 KB 5,471 KB 6,389,613 KB

 

A full SQL backup includes the content in the database, as well as the transaction logs, all rolled into one nice little package. If you need to move, backup, whatever, it’s a huge file. While the scripted backups are much smaller, much more portable, much more downloadable if you need to transfer from servers over the internet or a WAN. (I am actually downloading site backups from a clients dedicated server in a hosting environment in order to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 on an in-house system, so that’s where the reference comes from).

The scripts can be located at my previous post, https://stumpj.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/vbscript-better-sharepoint-backup-no-backup-exec-agents-no-sql-backups/

SharePoint Global Deployments

Use PowerShell to “Reset to Site Definition” in SharePoint 2010, for All sites

I recently had a request from a client performing upgrades to SharePoint 2010 to come up with a script to reset the sites to the definition for several hundred sites. I found a site on MSDN blogs that had sort of what I was looking for, but not quite. The link to that that post is here, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jjameson/archive/2010/05/18/use-powershell-to-quot-reset-to-site-definition-quot-in-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx.

In his Blog Jeremy shows how to use a PowerShell to reset site definitions for sites in a list, but what if you are migrating several thousands of sites over and want to get everything in one shot?

Here are my modifications to the script.

$ResetWebs = @(Get-SPSite
-limit all | Get-SPWeb $_.Url)
$ResetWebs |
    ForEach-Object{
        $DebugPreferences = “Continue“
        $web = Get-SPWeb $_.Url

        $DebugPreferences = “Continue“
        Write-host “Resetting all pages in site ($($web.Url)).“
        $web.RevertAllDocumentContentStreams()
        $web.Dispose()
}

Enjoy!

SharePoint 2010 Deployment Guide (Standalone Development box including 2008 R2 A/D, SQL 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010, Office Web Apps 2010) Part 2 (On Hold)

I just wanted to post a quick note, that obviously I didn’t get to part two the next day. I also had to fire through the rest of the configs to get the development server online for some offsite developers to start getting some hands on, so I will have to revisit this section when I get some more time to do so…