Can any one provide me the best practice for turning on/off the windows updates.
Do we need enable windows update by default as best practice in prod environment.
What I have done in my current new prod setup, I have installed all windows update till today in all server and done the necessary restart in the server.
Now I have disabled like below. Please correct me if I am doing any wrong so that I can learn new thing.
You really don't want to block updates all together on a production server as you will leave your system exposed to security issues.
However, as Microsoft is now pushing SharePoint CU's (Cumulative Updates) through this avenue, you don't want them to install automatically either as this could break your production SharePoint instance! You can set up your server to "download only" and then you can manually choose which updates to install.
Here is a really good article I'd recommend so you are more informed about what process you should follow that is the best practice for your organisation.
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2015/02/13/pushing-sharepoint-server-updates.aspx
Related
I am working SDL TRIDION 2011 SP1 version. Suddenly I am unable to see the Trdion site in Internet Information Services(IIS) Manager. Please tell me the procedure how to get it back again.
Remove Tridion Completely (uninstall), then run the installer again.
You won't loose any data (it's all in the database), and you're likely to get your server up and running way faster than trying to fix by hand.
As #bart suggested, your best option to get the web application back (assuming it really has gone), is to run the repair option with the installer. There are a lot of folder specific settings which would be very hard to recreate manually.
I've a VM (#1) with installed SP 2010 and SQL Server 2008. It suites our needs in terms of load and capacity. In case of breaking down we can revert it to the snapshot.
The development process still goes on.
The question is what is good approach for updating the production VM?
Variant 1:
Have a copy of production VM (#2)
When the iteration is finished (development->testing->fixing) and we ready to make update we swap the VMs (#1 <--> #2)
Testing VM #2 becomes production and #1 becomes testing one.
" + " : We go live with fully tested solution.
" - " : Mechanism for sync up between VMs is required.
Variant 2:
Develop, test and fix on the production VM
Publish changes when we are ready.
" + " : We don't need mechanism for sync up between VMs
" - " : Crashes can happen more often.
Any suggestion will be appreciated.
TIA
Do NOT do your development on the production VM. SharePoint is very easy to break during development and you will more than likely bring down your production environment at some point. The risk is basically too high.
Do your development on a separate system. Package your solution/changes properly as a WSP - test it on another system (in between your dev environment, and basically a copy of production). Once it passes all testing on your staging server, deploy the WSP to production.
Swapping systems is a pain in the arse when it comes to SharePoint - you have Alternate Access Mappings, IIS Bindings etc. to worry about - and takes more time and effort than simply just uploading a new WSP and hitting "deploy" (obviously, after testing on your stating server).
It really depends on "what" you are developing:
Content only
It is often easier to do this on the production machine. The standard publishing framework should be sufficent to hide changes from standard users.
Or you could use the content deployment features of sharepoint to move it from the dev farm to the production farm
Or you could use the content deployment tool
Webparts, simple components
In 2010, these should be done as sandboxed solutions (if you can get away with it), then they are very simple to upload/change on your prod environment. Build on your dev enironment, then upload through the sharepoint webpages.
Complex components
Things that require a farm administrator to install on the server (jobs, complex web parts, etc), should be developed with visual studio on your dev box, then moved to prod in a fully tested way. Try having a testing/stage environment.
A combination of all of the above
This usually depends on how much risk your client is willing to expose themselves to, say for instance, if it is a brand new server there is not much risk in taking down users of the system.
I would not recommend installing visual studio on a PRODUCTION SharePoint server
I have a sharepoint MOSS 2007 Install on a server and need to move it to another new server. Can I just ghost the complete server to the new one or do I need to install and configure the complete server again?
Any suggestions appreciated.
As far as I know you will have to reinstall MOSS on the new server as during the configuration process many settings form the acutal server are stored to the MOSS configuration database. So just moving the MOSS software and database won't work. Even just renaming the server on which MOSS is running will probably lead to a MOSS error.
To make it easy to move MOSS to another server in the future you should think about visualization. By this you can move the server to every server you want just by installing the visualization software and moving the virtual machine to the new host server.
This strategy will also help you in case of emergency when the MOSS server crashes due to a hardware error.
Your best bet would be to do a clean install on the new machine. This gives you the freedom to properly configure your machine(s) - name databases, pick ports for the Central Admin, SSP etc.
Resist the temptation to "upgrade" to a newer operating system (2003 to 2008), a new database (2000 - 2005 - 2008) or add service packs or the infrastructure update. If it isn't installed on the current production system - then don't install it on your new machine. Make a mirror of what you have and it will be much smoother.
Once the new server is configured the way you want it - just do a full backup from the Central Admin page on the old machine - and run a restore from the Central Admin on the new machine. This will pick up all the customizations etc that you have on the old site.
Once it's restored - and you've tested it and it's working the way you expect, run a full backup from the Central Admin page on the new server. That becomes your baseline for moving forward.
We are starting with Sharepoint development with a team of three and are currently setting up our development environments. We would like to avoid installing a Server 2008 for each developer, thus a single terminal server has been setup, using Remote Windows to start a VS2008 instance on each developer's machine. Now we would like to separate developers' testing environments (i.e. a different site colletion per developer), but have realized that the assemblies would need to be installed into GAC to show properly on the site. But since there is AFAIK only one GAC, developers wouldn't be able to test their stuff independently.
Is there any way we could create separate testing environments without installing a bunch of 2008 Servers?
So you're all going to remote in an fire up Visual Studio and be compiling stuff and restarting IIS, etc?
You're going to be stamping on each other's toes.
A wiser choice nowadays is to use Hyper-V (or some other virtualisation).
We use Windows Server 2008 on our laptops, and use Hyper-V to run our dev environments. We then have a dev environment (sandbox) each, and these have VS2008, SVN, Nunit, etc.
Our code is tested against each other thanks to CruiseControl on the only shared Hyper-V.
This has been great for us... we distribute the load, we can work on the move, we don't step on each others toes and if we need to do a demo we can switch Hyper-Vs and demo from the demo Hyper-V (branched from the dev one early on so that the environments are known).
Go virtual and don't look back.
PS: I've just seen your comment about one server... just put Hyper-V on that and run 3 instances. That's also what we do ;)
I don't know about installing the server on everything, but this sounds like an ideal task for Virtual Machines rather than physical ones- where I work we using VMWare a whole lot for this kind of work and it does very well.
It's also useful to be able to roll back to a snapshot when it comes to testing installation processes and so on.
No. In addition to the GAC there are all the SharePoint files in the 12 hive, such as features and site templates. It's not worth what you save on server costs.
(Of course if you don't use the GAC, but deploy to the bin folder, and you don't touch anything in the 12 hive, you can give each developer their own web application on the same server. But this approach puts a lot of restrictions on what they can do. It's still not worth it.)
Virtual machines will work, but they can be slow to develop on. For instance, you'll need to restart the application pool for every GAC deploy - which means a pause of maybe 15-60 seconds to reload the application, (depending on the hardware). This will become annoying.
Virtual machines work better for test and production, where you don't restart the application so often.
I recommend a physical server for each developer. This will minimize the code-deploy-test cycle time, and make sure they don't have to worry about stepping on each others toes.
You are on the wrong track with Terminal Services - its just not going to give you any separation.
A lot of people do recommend developing on W003/2008 server directly, and it does simplify some things like remote debugging.
I prefer the more traditional method of using VMWare to run virtual machines. These can be running on a local or remote host. Remote debugging is a little more complex to setup but still possible.
Finally - if possible then deploy to the bin dir rather than the GAC. This will make it much easier to deploy automatically after compilation.
The contributors are right that there are lots of stumbling blocks to multi-developer single server environments.
Number one developers will be trying to attach to the same Web Application process w2ps.exe so creating separate Web Applications on different ports is a must unless you are prepared to share time debugging. How to setup a development environment for sharepoint 2013
The second problem is when you try to collaborate and use shared components/features. Having a desire to work separately is debatable, I believe that the team developers should be collaborating and sharing so combing work is desirable to ensure seamless integration into a single final solution and that no work is duplicated. The multi-developer single server environment works perfectly until you try to collaborate 'One common mistake is to have one “development server” used by all team developers. Unless team members are working on totally unrelated components and never need to do common things such as restart IIS or attach a debugger to an IIS process, this type of environment generally doesn’t work well.' http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn145990.aspx We made this mistake through lack of experience and knowledge, but once you make it it's possible to work round it.
My first attempt to share features was to copy developer 1's project into developer 2's solution and add a reference to it in developer’s 2's project and add all the features to developer 2's package. Deploying this works fine for developer 2, until as I discovered if developer 1 detaches their solution from the debugger it retracts the solution based on the duplicated solution id from the farm and therefore from each developer's web application. Therefore developer 2 has the rug pulled out from underneath them. Although this is a part solution and seemed to work for a while, it took me a while to work out what was happening and what combinations of dev 1 and 2 deployments make each other’s work and not work.
So I found a better solution. Under the project properties in Visual Studio under SharePoint tab there is a combo box called 'Auto-retract after debugging'. This by default retracts the solution when the developer stops the attached debugger and pulls the features out from underneath the other developers. Unticking this box prevents the retract and leaves each developers individual solutions deployed at farm level and on reattaching to the debugger just replaces the solution with minimal fuss.
In my experience recycling the IIS application pool is so fast other developers don't even notice, but with a larger team than 2 this might become more prevalent, so perhaps someone else could add their experiences. I also guess unless the other develops try to attach at exactly the same time that the recycle is happening it'll be fine, so is a really small chance of having a cross over time, and simply detaching and reattaching will fix this if it is ever experienced.
I have a MOSS 2007 test site, its not public facing, instead its on our intranet, I am looking for an uptime monitoring component thats free and easy to install, any suggestions?
Update: I don't need graphs or anything fancy, I just need to make sure that I get a notification via email if the site goes down.
Nagios might be overkill, but it is not too hard to put in place ...
I also came across OpManager - http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/opmanager/
There is a free version which allows monitoring of 10 services.
I tried to get it to install on my SQL 2008 Server, but ended up just using the product default mySQL installation.
I also decided to uninstall it after 10 minutes worth of use, it seems like a great tool for a fully qualified network administrator, but it adds too much bloat to have it installed on my development server.