How to remove an unsuccessful AutoSPInstaller job

What do you need to uninstall from your server if the installation with AutoSPInstaller wasn’t successful?

Installing a SharePoint Server with the AutoSPInstaller job has become the gold standard for administrators. It’s much easier for large farms and offers a high degree of quality. However, using AutoSPInstaller can be a bit of a hassle. Until you get the xml configuration right, you normally need a few approaches. You can start the installation again, but you need to remove a few things first before it will re-run successfully.

Languages

If you are installing language files with your SharePoint Farm, remove these packages first. Open the Windows Control Panel, go to Programs -> Uninstall a program. Search for any SharePoint Language Package that has been installed and remove them all.

SharePoint Server

Leave the Control Panel open. Search for the SharePoint Server binary installation package and remove that file as well.

Prerequisites

These files must not be removed. They can stay on the server.

Internet Information Server

Open the IIS Management and look for any Web Application that was created during the AutoSPInstaller setup. Remove all of them and the Application Pools as well. Because AutoSPInstaller will create all of them again, I normally delete all Application Pools and Web Applications from IIS. This way I’ll have a clean system after setup.

The Web Applications create directories in the VirtualDirectories folder of the IIS working directory. You normally find it here:

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss

Remove the folders from the Web Applications you have deleted from here as well.

Log files

Remove the log files from the ULS logging directory or do a clean up after you sucsessfully installed SharePoint.

Search Index

If the SharePoint Search has been created already, go to the directory where the search index is stored. Delete all GUID directories you find there.

SQL Server

Open the SQL Management Studio and connect with the SQL instance you are using to host the SharePoint databases. Delete any database that has been created by the AutoSPInstaller script. At the prompt to delete the database, you should select to close any connection to the database.

Finally

Now reboot your server. After login back into the server you can restart the installation with AutoSPInstaller. Any traces of previous installations will be gone then.

Latest release of the SPBestWarmUp Script available

I finished the updates on the latest version of the SPBestWarmUp script and we’re heading version 2.0 (Stockholm). You can get it here on Codeplex.

SPBestWarmUp is a PowerShell script that will load all of your SharePoint web sites. By doing so it helps to populate the IIS and the asp.net caches. This will speed up accessing your server and give your users a better overall experience.

Change log:

• Removed the Internet Explorer to fetch webpages and switched instead to the Invoke-WebRequest Cmdlet. IE will be deprecated in the future anyway.
• Collecting all relevant Urls prior fetching them from the server.
• Temporarily removed the ability to use own Urls. Will be added in the future as a parameter and/or as a file. However, if you look at the code, you’ll find it isn’t hard to write your own little patch if you need to.

The code is marked as beta. To use it, collect a copy from the source repository.

Feedback is welcome. If you find any issue, please use the issues panel on the Codeplex project site.

Securing SharePoint 2013 connections via TLS - Part 2

Securing your SharePoint servers via TLS is mandatory these days. Learn how to encrypt your Site Collection communication and how to configure automated redirection to a secure connection.

Picture by Ondrej Supitar / unsplash.com

In part 1 I showed you how to secure a Host Named Site Collection with TLS. But a user can still open the site collection without encryption. To force a secure connection we’ll have to create an automated redirect from http to https.

Leave the unsecure binding

You might think it’s a good idea to remove the http binding from the web application in IIS. But this would break your configuration, so don’t do that. Instead the binding is necessary for IIS to know which web application handles the request. From here the URL Rewrite module we are about to configure will take over.

First things first

To create a redirect we need an IIS extention called URL Rewrite which isn’t part of the regular IIS installation and cannot be found in the Windows installation either. Instead you must open a browser and download it from the official IIS support site http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite

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Securing SharePoint 2013 connections via TLS - Part 1

Securing your SharePoint servers via TLS is mandatory these days. Learn how to encrypt your Site Collection communication and how to configure automated redirection to a secure connection.

Picture by Ondrej Supitar / unsplash.com

Using SSL/TLS to secure your webservers has always been a good idea, not only since three letter agencies are eavesdropping on everybody’s Internet communication. Preventing hacking and information lost is also on the IT-Professionals to-do list for a very long time.

Which certificate do we use

There are a few ways to get a new certificate for the Internet Information Server, but all in all in breaks down to the simple question: Do I need a trusted certificate or not.

If you plan to publish your site to the web I’d suggest you get yourself a trusted certificate from a certificate authority. There are a lot of different certification companies out there and all of them are happy to take your money.

If you plan to stay in a local network, you could consider using your own Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). But this however might be shooting a little too high. Especially if you only have a few servers to secure and no other plans to use the PKI.

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Log Parser Studio 2.2

Log files are a hassle. Too many entries and bad formatting make it a challenge to work with logs. So if you are already familiar with Microsofts LogParser, you’ll love to hear that there is an even better way to work with Log files.

Log Parser Studio is a Windows Tool that uses LogParser and gives you a GUI to work with. This way it's easier to create adhoc reports of your logfiles. You can export the query as a script and then automate your tasks.
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Log-Parser-Studio-cd458765

LogParser
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=24659

Getting Started with the Log Parser Studio
http://blogs.technet.com/b/karywa/archive/2013/04/21/getting-started-with-log-parser-studio.aspx

How to identify which w3wp.exe process belongs to which Application Pool in IIS

I received an e-mail today, where I was asked how to identify the IIS Application Pool and the corresponding w3wp.exe process. Actually it doesn’t need much and no extra tools are needed.

1. Open the Windows Task Manager by right clicking on the Taskbar and selecting Start Task Manager
2. In the Menu, open View / Select Columns…
3. Search the list for Command Line and enable the check box



4. Look for the w3wp.exe processes and expand the column for the command line

As you can see, the process is started with the name of the Application Pool in the IIS management console

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