As we all know, any new technology can be a pain to get right. With our solution and our deployment of our SharePoint farms we are running off Network Appliance hardware. We even had Microsoft certify that this is an accepted solution and gave it their blessing.

Our developers were having major troubles deploying their migration package to our Staging environment. They were getting very slow access time, and even timeouts, we're talking 10 minutes to upload one page. This put a major kink into our plans to deploy the new code and content to this environment. This started last week, so we put together a swat team to try and diagnose these issues.

Keys to the solution is diagnosing these issues:

SharePoint Itself
Active Directory
Firewalls
Network Connectivity
Sql
Network Appliance Hardware
Server Hardware (HP Blades)
Physical Drives & Spindles
Migration Tool (Uses SharePoint API's)
Server Trusts
A bunch of other small pieces of the pie.

As you can see from the above list there are many different items that we would need to check to verify there are no issues in that particular system.

The interesting thing is that as we go through the list everything checks out. So as I'm working with Microsoft we run PSSD and capture data from the Sql server to the NetApp.  NetApp ran another tool on their end. Come to find out we were getting massive reads but little to no writes. The network I/O was off the chart.

Come to find out the card on the Sql server was set to 1500mtu while the NetApp was running Jumbo 9000mtu. We re-cabled and switched our NIC cards on the SQL box to Jumbo.  Problem Solved.

It just comes to show that the smalled things can cause some of the biggest headaches.

I get a call from our marketing team that they are needing a redirect page on our public facing site. This redirect will send a user to a survey hosted outside of our environment. Our public site runs off MOSS (SharePoint 2007) and in looking at how to best redirect a user found this to be the easiest way to redirect them for us.

Open your site login with the required permissions in this case I'm logging in as the Farm Administrator.

Go to "Site Actions" then "Manage Content and Structure".

Create a new publishing site off the root of your site or where ever you want your redirect folder to sit. (Site >> New >> Site)
      This is the example I'm using
      Give it a title
      URL Name of the site
      Template Publishing >> Publishing Site
      Create Site

Go to your "Pages" folder. Create a new (Redirect Page) in this case I named it index.aspx.

Edit your redirect page and enter the URL where you are redirecting your traffic to.

Now a bit of a tricky part, you have to make sure you go into your "Site Settings" of that new site, navigate to "Look and Feel" and select "Welcome page" and change the default page listed by SharePoint to the page you have just created, in this case "index.aspx".

Now when a user visits the site http://www.yoursite.com/redirect/ it will automatically shoot them to the redirect URL you specified in the redirect page.

Enjoy!

Well, my first week in India was officially over yesterday.  We've had some issues with our development servers all week that we hope to have finally fixed today sometime (CST) Needless to say I was very busy this week on the MindTree Campus.. from talking with them over various issues, closing out requests, getting access for testing besides other things. I hope the coming week will be less stressful... I had been puting in dual shifts on most of the weekdays.

I'm going to post a few of the pictures I have taken... I have to apologize that i haven't taken that many.. around here if they see a person with a camera... well. they flock to you offering you anything from coconut milk, and autorickshaw taxi, or street vendor bananas.

Here are some pictures of my room in New Dehli for my layover... it's one of those rooms.. you just don't want to sleep in... and i'm hoping the red stuff on the wall was just paint. (For all pictures click the image for a bigger version)

Next is a picture of my room I'm staying in.  It's really enjoyable, the bed isn't the best but the overall room quality is nice. Not to mention the service of the staff. One thing in India they really do like the US and they have done anything to please me, from putting fresh fruit in the room to doing my laundry it's all top notch.

Finally, here are some initial pictures of the traffic.  Words cannot describe the traffic here except no rules bigger car or truck wins. Also of note the horn is used for everything from letting people know you're there.. to move over.. to i'm making a turn.. to hey i'm changing the channel on my radio. You just have to get used to it.

Things I've found interesting on my travels to and from MindTree

• People washing clothes on the concrete on the side of the road
• The wild horns some of the two ton trucks have
• There are no walmart type places.. just small open stores that sell various goods right next the road from fish lying on ice to gumdrops
• Every bus, car, rickshaw, scooter, motorcycle, or bus is packed with people to the point of overflowing.. i saw the train go by the other morning on my way in and people were actually hanging on to the side of the train.
• They still use Oxen, Donkeys, and horses to pull some of their carts.. all of the Oxen usually have bright things on their horns... as decoration
• The roads are terrible... and that's being kind
• The rivers are VERY polluted here, and i saw families washing themselves in it.. even the drain water... scary
• They have Hindu shrines all over the place.. and they cause traffic nightmares.. it took me 2 hours one night to get home because of one of these festivals
• Saw people living in tents.. some using candles to heat food.. sad
• I'm going to try and take a picture of the bright flowers the ox cars bring to market.. it's sooooo bright.. it's amazing
• Trees... there are trees everywhere.. it's called the Garden City.. my driver took me through a park.. and it was amazing.. saw real bamboo stalks growing.. they were huge!
• It's amazing some buildings are ultramodern.. like MindTree, Intel, and AMD.. but right next to them it looks like the building has been bombed out... just weird to see that
• Do It Yourself Home Electricity.. the infrastructure here is taxed... as rolling blackouts happen daily.. even here at the hotel.. if you go down a road.. you'll see all these wires people have ran themselves to get electricity...
• Lots of petrol stations.. but no petrol.. you'll see people going from one station to the next trying to find petrol (Gas).. they have shortages here bigtime
• Overstacked.. every truck, rickshaw, or animal drawn cart is overladen with merchandise or products.. to the point of tipping over
• Hawks.. you'll see giant birds just chill'n flying around the city. since the markets to get food are open.. they have a field day finding food
• Advertising.. it's everywhere.. walls, cars, poles, backs of cars... front of cars... on banners, on the backs of jackets... on scooters.. everywhere you look there are advertisments

Overall the people are very poor but very nice. They really cherish western culture and are super friendly to me... they ask me where i'm from, when I say the United States, every single one I've met have said.. what a great country.. i wish we could go there some day... you have freedoms that we can only wish for... One a side note.. they have freedom here but what they mean is that the caste system is still here and it really hurts people as they can't achieve a higher standard of living just because they were born to a lower caste... really sad

So I haven't been able to write alot lately... the new job keeps me on my toes...

My India Experience..

In doing the work I do now it has required me to travel to Bangalore, India.  I arrived on friday, and did my best to sleep off some nasty jet lag... (it took me over 30 hours to get here).  American Airlines of course grounded all their planes so i had to catch 2 puddle jumpers to Chicago before the main flight... of which i slept the entire way.  The New Dehli airport is something to behold, not only was walking off the plane like walking into a blast furnace... but the traffic was insane (more on that later as it gets worse) After spending the night awake in a room.. if that's what you can call it (i had a 10 hour layover and the airport there closes literally locks the door and you have to find a place to stay for the night). I was up the next morning and on my plane to Bangalore.

Arriving in Bangalore... the temperature was nice.. and the airport was actually better than New Dehli. Off to the hotel to check in and basically I crashed hard for a few days...

I hope to update more exploits as I get the time to write.. which i have now as really besides work i'm really not doing anything.

Things I should cover:

The Traffic
The Sea of People
Working at MindTree
The Food
The TV/Music
The Culture

Various other oddities and fun stuff that I've encountered.

Sorry for the lack of updating. Things have been nuts, between putting out fires and new server installs... feels like i haven't a chance to breathe.

Learning alot here, which is a good thing.

Looking forward to: 30 Days of Night on Blue Ray

Just started up with Emerson Electric today as the MOSS Technical Application Administrator.  I realize I have alot to learn here.  It is a gigantic corporation with many divisions and people.

Fixed my first real test. SharePoint Alert setup can be a major pain and today was the same.  The issue was after an alert was set, no outgoing emails were being sent.  There are countless posts and threads throughout the web but a couple were needed to fix this issue.

First of all, McAfee Antivirus, that special program, you have to make sure service applications can punch through port 25.  Once this is done you don't have to worry about port blocking.  Next, making sure the firewall itself allows the program to get out. Guess what.... after fixing the first 2 things.. more was needed.  Next I dove into SQL Server to fix table permissions for the content table, allowing the service account to properly access the tables. Last but not least, I had to go into Services and setup the Sharepoint Worker Process to use the proper access account.

So, through a couple hours of trial and error everything is successfully working and all users are receiving their email alerts and notifications.

After six years working at Thompson Coburn I've decided to make a career move.  I was offered an opportunity for more growth that made it impossible to say no. So as of January 28th I will be a MOSS Technical Application Administrator for another big company here in St. Louis.  This move allows me in on the ground floor of a massive MOSS (SharePoint 2007) project. This includes both external and internal facing sites.

The company I will be working for is a big change to what I have been doing for the last few years. I'm extremely excited about this move which will allow me to better concentrate on my skills relating to content managment and global branding.

Therefore, I will be trying to keep this blog up to date with technical challenges I'm facing, technical stuff I find cool, and other life events.  Next week may be sparse on posts as I'll be getting information transformed to others in my current group and my big 30th birthday is on Tuesday.