404 (Not Found) Error When clicking on MySite "My Profile" tab in SharePoint

This error is vexing, though there's a simple solution documented in MS kb924399. I've summarized the solution below with some assumptions about settings that folks normally use. In short, the problem is that there isn't a site collection set up using the appropriate template in the MySite web application. We'll correct that in a few steps. Note: it's entirely possible--even likely--that you've already got a site collection created at the root of the mysite web application. If this is a single personal site, that's part of your problem. This site will need to be backed up and deleted before you can go further, assuming that all of your other personal sites are using a different path. First, we need to create the managed path that SharePoint will use for this site collection.

This can be anything, but most people will have created their sites with the default root ( / ) site collection. So we'll go with that for our purposes.

To do this, click on Application Mangement -> Define Managed Paths. Make sure, once the defined managed paths screen comes up, that you've got the correct MySite web application selected in the top-right. Go ahead and create the managed path at the desired location.

Next, we'll want to create the site collection using the correct template.

Click on Application Management -> Create Site Collection to bring up the site collection screen. Make sure you've got the correct web application selected on the left, and then select the managed path you created in the step above for the URL.

Give the site collection a title, like 'Personal Sites', and -- here's the money part -- select the "My Site Host" template from the Enterprise template tab.

Fill in the site administrators fields appropriately and click on OK.

After doing these steps, the My Profile tab should work again.

401 Error when trying to create MySite (personal site) in SharePoint 2007

It's a common enough problem that you can find untold numbers of questions posted to forums and blogs: why am I getting a 401 denied error when trying to get to/create a mysite personal site in SharePoint? The problem usually is manifest by first being presented with a username/password prompt three times, followed by a 401 error. Interestingly, in Firefox, it appears that sometimes you just get unending username/password prompts. Why this is happening: who knows? It's often possible to track down the problem, usually related to application pool permissions or some rogue setting in SharePoint. Even if you do find the problem, though, enough settings in SharePoint are reasonably inaccessible after the initial setup that finding your way to correcting it can take a very, very long, frustrating time. Our solution has been simply to create a new default shared services provider (SSP) and associate all of the web applications, including the existing mysites, to the new SSP. The Shared Services Provider in SharePoint is the glue that holds everything together. It manages, in particular, what happens when you click on the "mysite" link. So when that link no longer functions properly, one way to fix it is to set up a new SSP using a new content database and new IIS web site. In this way, we can eliminate a lot of errors without having to do a lot of painful troubleshooting. We'll go through those steps now. Note that these steps are for SharePoint 2007; they may work on 2003 as well, but I've no experience with it, so I make no promises as to its applicability. Create the New Shared Services Provider Open SharePoint Central Administration and click on the Shared Services Administration link on the left-hand side of the screen. You should see something like the screen shot below. To create a new Shared Services Provider, click on the New SSP link. You'll want to create a new web application to host this, on a new port. Also, specify a new SSP Database, ensuring that any erroneous settings don't get migrated. Make sure that you use your existing MySite web application (in this example, named "Sharepoint - Personal") for the My Site Location in setting up this new SSP. Once you've created your new SSP, you can set it as the default (using the Change Default SSP link). Once you've done that, use the Change Associations link to associate all of your existing web applications to the new SSP. Having done that, you're probably good to go. You might, just to be safe, double-check your My Site settings in the new Shared Services site. Check your My Site Settings On the left-hand menu, under Shared Services Administration, click on the title of your new SSP. This will open the SSP home page, like below. Click on the My Site Settings link and make sure that the Personal Site Location field matches what you had set up previously. Having done that, you're done! Delete any erroneously-created My Sites Unless you're not: if you discover later that the personal site location field is incorrect, you may end up with users creating new sites when they already had one. This is disconcerting, but it's easily fixed. To delete a user's My Site, simply click on the Delete Site Collection link in the Application Tab of the Central Administration page. There you can select the offending site collection from the My Site web application. This will delete the My Site without problem. However, you still need to change the My Site settings in the SSP, as above. And: having done so, issue a iisreset /noforce on the front-end web servers. Unless you do this, the user runs the risk of being directed, even still, to the now-nonexistent My Site. This gives them a 404 (not found) error. After the iisreset, they should be directed, again, to their original my site.

Configuring SharePoint 2007 to Display Errors

By default (and this is a good thing), SharePoint displays a simple generic "an error has occurred" message when a problem arises. In troubleshooting these problems, it's useful to turn on more descriptive error messages. The first thing to realize in any discussion of detailed error messages on the web is that it's generally not a good thing to keep your site configured to display details of the errors that are generated; it can reveal much about your infrastructure and security that is best kept secret. So: when you make these changes, be sure to unmake them later. Locating Web.config Configuring SharePoint to display a details (including a stack trace) of its errors involves two simple changes to the web.config file that is stored in the root of the affected web site. Hopefully, in setting SharePoint up, you opted to use meaningful names for the web sites. If, however, that didn't happen, call up the Web Application List in SharePoint's application management tab. You'll see a list of the sites (name) and their respective URLs. Those names correspond to the site names in IIS. Of course, SharePoint doesn't care where that document root is, so if you don't already know where the document root is, open up IIS manager and view the web site's properties. Click on the Home Directory tab, and you'll see the path to use. web.config will be in that directory. Modifying Web.config Having located web.config, open it in a text editor, and find the following line:

<customerrors mode="on" />

Change the above setting to Off. This tells the web app server to display errors as they occur, instead of the generic SharePoint-defined custom error of "An Error occurred." Likewise, find

<SafeMode MaxControls="200" Callstack="false"

Change the false above to true. This tells the web app server to display the error stack when an error occurs. When you save your changes, you should be set, and your SharePoint errors now will display as they occur.

Backing up and Restoring SharePoint 2007 Sites and Site Collections

Restoring SharePoint 2007 sites and web applications from a backup can be quite a headache; SharePoint is famously tight-lipped when it comes to error messages. This is a rundown of some of the issues we've run into in restoring from backups.

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Restore Errors

DCOM Permissions

If your restore fails with a log referencing "UnauthorizedAccessException" referencing a COM class with a long CLSID and error number 80070005, you've got a COM Config permissions problem. This error is accompanied by a system event log like the one below.

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230}
to the user domain\databaseconnectuser SID (S-1-5-21-2142909598-1293495619-134157935-85307). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

As the event log error indicates, the fix for this is to use the Component Services tool (dcomcnfg.exe) to give Local Activation permissions to the user listed. Here's the rub: you don't at this time know which COM class to modify. To figure that out, search in the registry for the CLSID as referenced in the event log and restore log.

The registry search will give you the name of the com class. Unless it doesn't: a common class to have this problem is OSearch. If, when you search the registry, you see "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Search Gathering Manger", the name you'll look for in the component services tool is OSearch.

By the way, you're looking in the DCOM Config tree in Component Services, as in this screen shot.

Right-click on the appropriate class and select Properties. Then click on the Security tab and edit the Launch and Activation Permissions.

Add the user that is mentioned in the event log, and give that user local launch and local activation permissions.

Finally, restart IIS with a iisreset /noforce. That should take care of this error.

Web Site Is In Use Restore Error

Especially if you've set up multiple SharePoint sites using host headers and SSL, you'll likely end up with the following error when trying to restore the web application:

ArgumentException: The IIS Web Site you have selected is in use by SharePoint.
You must select another port or hostname.

The issue is that SharePoint, in restoring the IIS sites, doesn't restore the host headers, as well. Hard to figure out why, but there you have it. Moreover, this error isn't a IIS error, which is to say that, even if you fix the alleged conflict, SharePoint still will error out on the restore, because it still thinks there's a problem.

So you have to do one of two things: customize the settings when you restore the web applications (to use different port numbers), or restore them one at a time, configuring each after the individual restore to use host headers. In either case, to end up with the original URLs, you'll have to do some fiddling after the restore is complete.

In short: you want to restore the web applications, such that you've got the content back. Having done that, you can re-create the web sites, using the Extend an existing Web application component of SharePoint's Application Management.

Extend the newly-restored web application to a new IIS web site, using the appropriate port number and URL. Once you've extended it, you can go back and "Remove SharePoint from IIS Web site." Using the remove function, you can delete the unwanted site, leaving only the desired URL.

SharePoint with SQL Server Mirroring

While most documentation for implementing Microsoft SharePoint suggests using SQL Server clustering for high availability and failover, database mirroring might be as good or even a better option. If, for instance, you don't have a SAN, you might really appreciate the ability to use database mirroring instead. This post runs through using DB mirroring with SharePoint 2007. There is a ton of information out there about implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), but my experience is that the bulk of them fall into two basic categories: very basic step-by-step instructions that don't go into much detail on the why of it all, and those that focus entirely on the why without talking much, if at all, about the how. So you either end up with a theoretical understanding of the underpinnings of SharePoint (assuming you are familiar with the terminology), or you are able to set a basic MOSS site without knowing if you're following best-practices, or if what you're doing will even give you what you want. It's my hope--as we go through our implementation--to find and post a middle road through all this. By way of starting out, here are a few documents that have been helpful in implementing SharePoint.

• Microsoft SQL Server Mirroring with SharePoint Unfortunately, this document is almost entirely instructions on how to set up database mirroring in SQL Server. If you're a DBA, this is not useful information to you, and if you're not a DBA, you're likely going to use the SQL Server GUI to implement database mirroring, anyway (the white paper gives instructions on mirroring through T-SQL commands). Happily, though, there is a bit on configuring SharePoint to use the mirror database in the event of a failover. In short: you use the SQL Alias feature (through cliconfg.exe) on the front-end web server(s). This is the method we ended up using.

Implementing DB Mirroring with SharePoint

Here's where the rubber hits the road. To be clear: we're talking SQL Server 2005, here. In short, this is what we're doing:

• Mirror the SQL Server databases
• Ensure the SharePoint login accounts can access the mirror DB server
• Configure the SharePoint front-end web server(s) to allow for failover

At the moment, we're not going to go into much detail on setting up the mirroring; that may be added at another time. It's a good idea to set up a witness server (instance, really); that makes testing the failover much easier, and the witness instance can be a SQL Server Express instance, so it won't cost you any more. Do make sure your logins from the primary database instance are copied to the mirror instance. This KB article from Microsoft talks about doing so. Or you can see my summary in this post.

Setting up the Server Alias

Here's the money piece. SQL Server includes a "alias" feature that allows you to create a synonym, stored in the registry, for a SQL Server. This is important, because, for some reason, MOSS 2007 developers decided not to include SQL Server mirror failover capability in the product. <Actually, this decision probably is a function of the way SharePoint handles the database; it really does treat the SQL Server instance as a whole, rather than as several databases. Given that, it does follow that--since mirroring is a database-level (rather than instance-level) high-availability technology--SharePoint mightn't work quite right with mirroring. Still, it'd have been nice for them to have worked out a way for this to function.> To create an alias, run the application cliconfg.exe. This allows you to create an alias for a SQL Server machine, stored in the registry. It should be noted here that there may be two versions of this application if you're running this on a 64-bit server. They are identical except that the 32-bit version stores the alias in the 32-bit compatibility registry key. We've had instances in which we've had to set the alias up in both the standard (64-bit) and compatible (32-bit) keys in order to get SharePoint to use the alias fully. Note that when you create a TCP alias, the port matters. If you're not pointing the alias to a named instance, the port by default is 1433. Additional instances will always have a different port. You can find the port number either in the current SQL Server startup logs or by using the SQL Server configuration utility. The registry key in which the alias is stored is at

\\HKLM\Softare\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\ConnectTo\

While the 32-bit compatible key is at

\\HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\ConnectTo\

A TCP Alias breaks down something like this: DBMSSOCN,servername,4984 Where DBMSSOCN refers to TCP, servername is the server name, and 4984 is the port number. A Named Pipes Alias, on the other hand: DBNMPNTW,\\servername\PIPE\MSSQL$spstg\sql\query Where DBNMPNTW refers to Named Pipes, servername is the server name, and $spstg is the instance name. Once you've got these registry keys set, it's a simple matter of changing the server name (and port, if necessary) in the alias after a failover. This will point SharePoint to the mirror DB server instead of to the primary. If you're comfortable doing this, changing the registry directly is quite sufficient. If not, you can edit the alias with the cliconfg.exe application. After changing the alias, it's prudent to go ahead and reset IIS. You can simply run the IISRESET command from the command line to do this. It should be pointed out again that, while SQL Server DB mirroring is on a database-level (that is, a single database within an instance can fail over to the mirror), SharePoint, for the most part, treats the SQL Server instance as a unit. While it's possible to use STSADM to rename a server for a particular database, this seems like more work than is necessary. To do this failover automatically requires another step, and it's one that we're still working on. I'll post that as we move closer to that goal.