Image Locations and Relative Paths

I add or update custom images so infrequently on a SharePoint server that I always end up endlessly digging around the hard drive until I find the right location.  So to save some time and effort, I thought I would just put it here.

The location on the drive of the SharePoint server that is running the web front end is at:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

Now, you may have SharePoint installed on a different drive, so the drive letter may change, but this will point you in the right direction.

Note: the above example is for SharePoint 2010, for SharePoint 2007 substitute 12 for 14.

And when you are referencing your images from a SharePoint site, the relative path to this folder is:

/_layouts/images/image_file.png

Don’t forget the “/” before “_layouts”.

So for example, when you add a custom logo or your corporate logo to your SharePoint site, you would copy the image to the drive at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES and then reference the image from Site Settings.

Log into your SharePoint site. From the Site Actions drop-down menu, select Site Settings.

Then select Title, description, and Icon from the Look and Feel section.

Lastly, provide the relative URL of the image you copied to the server earlier.

Click Click here to test to ensure you have constructed the relative URL path correctly.

Click OK. 

You should now see the new image on your SharePoint site.

App Offline File

A colleague pointed out this extremely useful tip for a quick and easy way to provide a friendly message to users when a SharePoint site is being upgraded or changes are  occurring behind the scenes.  This applies not just to SharePoint 2007 sites, but any .NET 2.0 application.

By simply placing an HTML file named app_offline.htm in the root of your web application (not necessarily the root of your web server), your users will get your custom HTML message instead of a nasty ASP.NET error message.   One caveat to this is to be sure that the file is at least 512 bytes in size.  If you don’t have enough text in your custom app_offline.htm page, just add a series of hidden comments. 

The beauty of this is that you can have this file ready and waiting, and it only takes a few seconds to copy it to the right folder before performing any maintenance. 

If you have a lot of SharePoint web applications and you were not consistent in your naming of their virtual directories (like I did), right click on your SharePoint web site in IIS 7, and select Explore.  This will open the root of your web application on the file system.  Drag and drop your app_offline.htm file to this folder.  When your maintenance is complete, drag this file out the folder.

A great resource and a simple example of this can be found at ScottGu's blog site.

Create Your Own SharePoint SP2 SlipStream

1. Copy the original media to a folder on the local drive of the server. For example, c:\sharepoint_install.
2. Download WSS Service Pack 2 (wssv3sp2-kb953338-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe) KB Article 953338
3. Download Office SharePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe) KB Article 953334
4. Create the updates folder c:\sharepoint_install\updates
5. Extract both the WSS and the MOSS Service Pack files to the \updates folder of the original installation media. For example – c:\sharepoint_install\updates
   

For WSS 3.0 SP1

• Run the following command as an administrator:

c:\wssv3sp1-kb936988-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:c:\sharepoint_install\updates

• You will see a dialog box asking you to accept the license terms. Check the box and click continue. To suppress the dialog box add the /quiet switch when extracting the Service Pack files.
• The files will extract to the \updates folder.
  

For MOSS SP1

• Run the following command as an administrator

c:\officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:c:\sharepoint_install\updates

• You will see a dialog box asking you to accept the license terms. Check the box and click continue. To suppress the dialog box add the /quiet switch when extracting the Service Pack files.
• The files will extract to the \updates folder.

You now have an up-to-date installation package for installing SharePoint.

SharePoint 2007 and SQL Server 2005 - SharePoint SSP SQL Jobs not Deleted

The Windows Application Event Logs were filling up with login failures for the account that is used to access the SQL Server databases located on a separate server.

There were thousands of entries on the SQL server with:

Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\service.account'. [CLIENT:local machine]

I then looked at the SQL logs that were generated and stored at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG
Again, the error logs were filled with login failures such as:
Logon Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 16.
Logon Login failed for user DOMAIN\service.account'. [CLIENT:local machine]

The error messages did not reference a specific database, which made finding the cause of the problem difficult. The frustrating part was that SharePoint 2007 was working just fine. There were no errors and no failures from the SharePoint server itself. Users were creating lists, libraries and storing documents.

The SQL Server is using Windows Authentication. The account service.account had all the correct rights and permissions for accessing all of the SharePoint databases. It was set to use ‘master’ as the default database. To be certain, I added the account to the local administrator group, as well as the domain administrators group (overkill). I double-checked SharePoint and the configuration to be sure the correct account was being used.

Then I went back to the SQL server and started looking at the SQL Server Agent logs, and I found my first clue.

My SQL Agent logs were filled with the following error messages:

SQLServer Error: 18456, Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\service.account’ [SQLSTATE 28000]
SQLServer Error: 4060, Cannot open database "DBNAME_SSP_DB" requested by the login. The login failed. [SQLSTATE 42000]

It identified the DBNAME_SSP_DB as the database that was trying to be accessed. So now I had both the database name and I knew it was the SQL Server Agent service. Unfortunately – the DBNAME_SSP_DB database did not exist on my server.

The database DBNAME_SSP_DB was created during an initial installation of SharePoint, and later the SSP was deleted, along with the corresponding database.

I went back to SQL Server Management Studio to look for references to DBNAME_SSP_DB and found a SQL Server Agent Job named DBNAME_SSP_Job_DeleteExpiredSessions
This jobs task is to run every minute to clean up ‘expired sessions from the session state database’.

When the SSP and corresponding database had been deleted, this job had failed to be deleted along with them.

Once this job was deleted, the errors stopped occurring.

Resetting the SQL Service Account Password for SharePoint (MOSS) 2007

Symptoms
Cannot connect to the SharePoint Central Admin Site (Error 503 Service Unavailable).

This may at first manifest itself as a generic SharePoint “Error” with a “return to site” link that does not work. This is indicative that the SharePoint site is up and running but the SharePoint site cannot connect to the SharePoint Content Database with the current credentials.

Update the following SQL services with the new account password. This assumes that all SQL services use the same account and password.

• SQL Server (instance name)
• SQL Server Agent (instance name)
• SQL Server Browser
• SQL Server FullText Search (instance name)

Restart each service.

The SQL logs will have errors that a specific account from a specific IP address cannot connect.

Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\your.sql.server.service.account'. [CLIENT: 192.XXX.XXX.XXX]

To Correct This

Change the password on a domain controller or via ADUC to comply with any policies that may be in place. This post came about because of a GPO that was being applied to service accounts and admin accounts.

• Log on the server running the Central Administration web site.
• Navigate to the following location:
  C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin
  

• Run the following command to change the Farm Credentials account used to access SQL Server
  Stsadm –o updatefarmcredentials –userlogin DomainName\UserName -password NewPassword
  

• When completed, run the IIS Reset command
  iisreset /noforce
  

Verify success by logging on to the SharePoint Site with Internet Explorer.

More help on this can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838