SharePoint Web Services & SOAP

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Joe Waldin

Here is a video showing you how to combine two contact lists from two sub-sites into one simple web page on a top-level site using SOAP services. I briefly walk you through some of the fundamental SOAP and web service concepts. However, there is much to cover in web services and this video addresses only one small aspect of a massive subject. With a length of eighteen minutes it is one of my longer training videos. You can fast forward to the 5 minute mark if you want to omit the SOAP and WSDL tutorial.

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Sysprep and WSUS and Cloned VM’s

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Joe Waldin

If you are cloning a VM that will be getting it’s updates from a local WSUS, you need to delete two keys from the registry. WSUS and Windows (online) Update generate there own client ID in the registry. If you update your VM template to keep it current, this client ID will exist.  In fact every clone that you create will have this same ID.  Here is how I work around this…

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Clear All Event Logs with PowerShell

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Joe Waldin

I had a situation where I needed to clear all of the event logs on a 2008R2 Windows Server. I launched the event viewer and was going to manually clear each of the logs.

Yikes! There are 394 event logs on my server. No way am I going to do this manually. This is a job for PowerShell.

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VMware says disable screen saver in all VM’s

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Joe Waldin

According to VMware, screen savers are not necessary for virtual machines and if they are running, they waste valuable CPU cycles.

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Why you need to use SysPrep tool with VM’s

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Joe Waldin

If you plan to have VM’s that are joined to a domain or  if you have a WSUS server and want your VM’s to have access to the WSUS updates, you need to use Sysprep.  According to the VMware forums, WSUS needs all of the client servers/OS to have unique ID’s. This is super easy to do.

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Disable Shut Down Event Tracker

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Joe Waldin

I have a server that hosts several VM’s. This server has more VM’s than the available host memory (16GB) can support so I am always shutting down a VM so I can bring another VM on line.  I became annoyed with the Shut Down Event Dialog being displayed every time I needed to shut down a VM.

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i1912 SEL FULL – Delete all System Event Logs with Powershell

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Joe Waldin

I have a Windows 2008 R2 server that is a dedicated host for my VM’s. I test a lot of applications, experiment with SharePoint farms, and occasionally blow things up.  This activity generates a boat load of errors which get written to the event logs.

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ERROR: Windows Platform FIPS

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Joe Waldin

When I was installing SharePoint on some heavily STIG’d servers for a customer, I got the following error…

Failed to create the configuration database.

An exception of type System.InvalidOperationException was thrown. Additional exception information: This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms.

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Axceler ControlPoint

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Joe Waldin

The Axceler advertisement says “ControlPoint will blow you away” and that’s exactly what the Axceler folks did when I sat through a two hour online presentation of their “ControlPoint” and “Davinci” products earlier today.  As the President of the RVSPUG, I am familiar with many of the names of SharePoint productivity tool providers like Quest, AvePoint, Corasworks, Idera, etc. However, I have only lightly browsed their ad brochures. Obviously, with that limited product exposure, I never really saw any value or desire to learn more.

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Install SharePoint Prerequsites From a File Share

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Joe Waldin

This video is part 1 of 2. Here we show how to use a clever PowerShell script to download the SharePoint installation prerequisites to a file share. You will need to download the script file from CodePlex at the link below. Thanks to Brian Lalancette who posted the script on Codeplex.
Part 2 of this video will show how to make modification to the SharePoint installation script so it will use the file share instead of downloading the files.

Here is the link to the script file…

http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/releases/view/44442

Good Luck!

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