Phil Hunter

Sometimes things can and do go wrong when working with WSS or SharePoint.  The first port of call should be the SharePoint Log files.

If this help then its a good idea to change the default behavour of the .NET web application to allow the application stack traces to be shown when the page fails to render.  Simply locate your web applications web.config file and make the following changes:

From:
<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="false" DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50" AllowPageLevelTrace="false">

To:
<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="true" DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50" AllowPageLevelTrace="false">

and also

From:
<customErrors mode="On" />

To:
<customErrors mode="Off" />

phil Microsoft, SharePoint error, SharePoint, stacktrace, unexpected

Having recently convinced my wife that she needed to make the switch to Mac OS X I was horrified to find that the Mac would not open WMF files.  Over the years I have accumulated a large collection of clip art files in the WMF (Windows Metafile) file format and didn’t really want to start again.

I found the quickest way to resolve this was to convert all of my existing WMF file into the PICT file format.  Using one of my Linux servers I ran the following shell command against my picture library:

find /home/user/clipart/ *.WMF -print0 | while IFS= read -rd $'\0' f;
do echo "[$f]";
convert "$f" "$f.pict";
rm -f "$f";
done

This creates a list of files who’s file-name ends with WMF.  We then loop through each of these file-names converting each and saving it with a .pict file extension.  The IFS= read -rd parameters are absolutely necessary should your WMF files contain spaces.

phil Linux, Mac, Microsoft PICT, WMF

This tutorial assumes that you have a Linux box with OpenSSL installed,and that you want to create a self-signed certificate for IIS5.0

1. Set up your CA (you only have to do this once)
   ON THE LINUX BOX…
   • Create a private key
     

     openssl genrsa -des3 -out CA.key 1024

     (You’ll need to supply a passphrase. DON’T FORGET THIS!!)

   • Set this to read-only for root access only
     

     chmod 400 CA.key

   • Create the CA certificate
     

     openssl req -new -key CA.key -x509 -days 1095 -out CA.crt

     (Provide appropriate responses to the prompts…for Common Name, you might want to use something like “OurCompany CA”)

   • Country Name: GB
   • State or Province Name: Newcastle
   • Locality Name: Gateshead
   • Organization Name: Your company name
   • Organizational Unit Name: OI
   • Common Nmae: www.yourwebsite-address.com
   • Email Address: your-admin-email@address.com
   • Set the certificate to read-only for root access only
     

     chmod 400 CA.crt

2. Obtain a CSR
   ON THE IIS BOX…
   • Open the Internet Manager
   • Select the site for which you want to create a key
   • Right-click and choose Properties
   • Select the “Directory Security” tab
   • Click the “Server Certificate” button
   • Follow the prompts to create a CSR
   • Save your CSR, then transfer it to the Linux box for further processing. (For the following steps, we’ll refer to your CSR as “new.csr”)
3. Sign the CSR
   ON THE LINUX BOX…
   • Sign the CSR (all of this on one line)
     

     openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in new.csr -CA CA.crt
     -CAkey CA.key -CAcreateserial -out new.crt

   • Transfer the new.crt file back to the IIS box
4. Install self-signed certificate
   ON THE IIS BOX…
   • Open the Internet Manager
   • Select the site to install the key
   • Right-click and choose properties
   • Select the “Directory Security” tab
   • Click the “Server Certificate” button
   • Specify that you want to complete the pending request
   • Select the .crt file that you just transferred

phil Linux, Microsoft