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If you've ever looked at the URL for an of the _catalog or _layouts admin pages, you may have thought like I did, "I can remember that… It's just xxx.aspx in the layouts folder"… Yeah right… We've taken, like many people do, and hidden some of the menu options in the Site Settings screen, to help our users not mess with things they do not understand in the Self-Provisioned Team Sites we have.  Now if only I can remember which ones I hid and how to get to them…

Here's a list I made up to help me remember:

You must disable "Strict Name Checking" on Windows 2003 server to allow the server to respond to a DNS alias. This is done via registry editing:

HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanServerParameters
Value name: DisableStrictNameChecking
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value: 1

This allows the Server "Server1" or "Server1.MyDomain.Pri" to respond to a DNS entry like "CoolService" or "CoolService.MyDomain.Pri"… This is disabled by default, as it loosens security. It is not recommended to do this in a DMZ or Internet Zone.

FYI, a reboot is required to make the change work.

So at 2PM a couple of weeks ago (2 days prior to the SharePoint Global Go-Live for our organization), we decided to rebuild the entire farm due to inconsistencies and issues with the farm servers, including the MSCS clustered SQL back end.

No problem, we built these things many times… or so we thought! Around 2AM we found that we were having major issues installing SQL 2005 as a clustered instance. The two Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 servers were humming along, behaving perfectly fine. They were clustered with shared SAN disk, and test resources could be failed over without issue.

But SQL would not install… We could install on one node, but not the other. Uninstall completely, and install the other node was fine as well, but then the first wouldn't install.

Turns out that two different server technicians had built up our two nodes, and had named them slightly differently. One name was entered at setup all lowercase, the other all capitals.

"Well that shouldn't make a difference…" I said, along with probably 99% of anyone who might read this… But no, wait for it… It does! But only in SQL 2005 setup. The names must match exactly. Unfortunately, the name of the node is hard-coded in the clusBD when it is added to the cluster, in a case sensitive format. It cannot be changed. I found that you can change the physical machine name using the ActveComputerName registry entry, but the clusDB will re-write t to match it's format when the cluster service starts up. The only thing you can do it nuke the node, rename it with the correct case, and then re-add it to the cluster.

Strange, but very true!

I've finally settled down and found myself a landing pad for my blog   Thanx to Dustin and the folks at sharepointblogs.com for making this available! 

If you've just found me, I'm a long-time technologist whose bounced around the engineering circles from networking to Windows technologies, to application design, to SharePoint and other collaboration platforms.   My postings tend to be a bit sporadic, and lean toward problem solving and bizarre, little known facts…

As a word of warning, I am an armature chef, so be forewarned that you may find a few food facts and recipes buried in my technical posts on occasion