Cross Farm Deployment pt 1

I haven't posted in a while because I have been stuck in the 'hell' that is content deployment in MOSS 2007.

We've a 3 tier environment - one for development, one for staging and one for live. As these environments were not all available at the time of initial construction it has been a pain to get the deployment working. I think I have described the topology that we have but I'll quickly run through it again. In dev we have 2 x virtual MOSS boxes, in staging we have 1 x MOSS box and SQL in the domain and 1 x WFE in the DMZ, in live we have 1 x MOSS box , 1 x SQL cluster in the domain and 2 x WFE in the DMZ with a Domain Controller.

The initial pain was to get all the boxes talking to each other through the relevant ports - this is where if you have a third party running your firewalls you'll need them on call to create the relevant rules for the traffic(port 80, 433, 1433 etc). Once this was done it was the tedious process of getting each of the boxes into the relevant farm and get the services running - so far so good.

Once this was done the deployment process was started from between the development servers. If you running these as virtual machines ensure that the SQL box is a physical box as the processes will grind to a halt/very slow with the disc read/write operations in the virtual environment. This is where we are at the moment - the deployment has been proven between all the boxes as necessary.

We have a publishing site which has been heavily customized and needs to be deployed between the two development boxes and it has failed a number of times. It appears that the customization of the base pages etc is causing an issue. I'll write some more later in the week.

MOSS 2007 Internet Development

We've got a deployment going on here that has the WFE's in a DMZ and an application server and SQL server on the LAN.

The installation of MOSS is fine on the LAN as you get authentication from the Domain Controllers - when you add the WFE in the DMZ you don't!! A trust relationship has to exist between the DMZ and the LAN - OK so far but if you have more than 1 WFE in the DMZ you can't run PSConfig to use SQL authentication. So our solution is to have a Domain Controller in the DMZ and establish trust back to the LAN, use Port 1433 for SQL and Port 80 as per normal and use content publishing between the application server (where users will edit content) and the DB's that the WFE's are pointing to.

U2U CAML Query Builder

I recently installed and used the CAML Query Builder from U2U. It's a good tool but there was one gotcha - in the XML that is built, the query is nested in <Query></Query>, - alright so far and the tool returns results. Copy this and use it in the SPQuery object and all results are returned regardless of the query used !? Well by removing the <Query></Query> tags it resolves the issue.

Trace and Event Log Categories

Least critical event to report to the event log

None

Error

Warning

Audit Failure

Audit Success

Information

Least critical event to report to the trace log

None

Unexpected

Monitorable

High

Medium

Verbose

Event Throttling Categories

All	Administration
Backup and Restore	Backward Compatible Administration
Backward Compatible Site Object Model	Business Data
Communication	Content Deployment
Database	Document Management
E-Mail	Excel Calculation Services
Excel Services Administration	Excel Services Cache
Excel Services External Data	Excel Services Session
Excel Services Web Front End	Excel Web Access
Excel Web Services	Feature Infrastructure
Fields	Forms Services Administration
Forms Services Conversion and Deployment	Forms Services Data Binding
Forms Services Data Objects	Forms Services Deployment
Forms Services File Open	Forms Services Object Model
Forms Services Rendering	Forms Services Runtime
Forms Services Runtime	Forms Services Runtime - Business Logic
Forms Services Runtime - Data Connections	Forms Services Runtime - Session State
Forms Services Validation	General
Group Approval Enhanced Group Management Library	Group Approval Enhanced Group Management Pages
Group Approval Library	Group Approval Pages
Group Approval Schedules	Group Approval SOAP
Information Policy Management	IRM
Knowledge Network Server	Launcher Service
Load Balancer Service	Long running operation infrastructure
MCMS 2002 Migration	MS Search Administration
MS Search Advanced Tracing	MS Search Indexing
MS Search Propagation	MS Search Query
MS Search Query Processor	Office Server General
Office Server Shared Services	Project Server - General
Project Server Active Cache Enterprise Resource Load	Project Server Active Cache Load
Project Server Active Cache operations	Project Server Active Cache Save
Project Server Active Directory Synchronization	Project Server Analysis Cube Building
Project Server Archive, Restore	Project Server Calendars
Project Server Global	Project Server Notifications
Project Server Portfolio Management	Project Server Provisioning
Project Server Queue	Project Server Reporting
Project Server Resource	Project Server Security
Project Server Server-Side Events	Project Server Sharepoint Integration
Project Server Status Reports	Project Server Summary Resource Assignments
Project Server Task Statusing and Updates	Project Server Timesheet
Project Server-side Project Operations	Project Web Access
Publishing	Publishing Cache
Publishing Provisioning	Records Center
Runtime	Runtime
Server Help	Session State Service
Setup and Upgrade	SharePoint Services
Site Directory	Site Management
SSO	Timer
Timer Job	Topology
Unified Logging Service	Upgrade
User Profiles	Web Controls
Web Parts	WebParts
Workflow Features	Workflow Infrastructure

These are the categories available for logging under the Event Throttling Category in Diagnostic logging in MOSS 2007

MOSS 2007 Webpart Control Events not Firing

I found this an 'interesting one'.

protected override void CreateChildControls()
{
try
{
PopulateDataTable();
CreateDropDown();
base.CreateChildControls();
}
catch(Exception ex)
{...}
}

When creating a Webpart and I had the events wired up in the CreateDropDown() they would not fire but when I moved them into the CreateChildControls() they did!

All the CreateDropDown() did was populate a drop down from the table created in the PopulateDataTable() and wire up the Click event.

I haven't found an answer yet as to why this would happen but I'll look into it later but it worked for me.

Basic MOSS 2007 Installation

I found this article about the steps to configure a basic MOSS 2007 Farm

http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2006/11/07/installing-rtm.aspx