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I assisted a company today with a spectacular Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) crash. The experience showed some folly in the oft-claimed mantra that Windows-based applications are graphical and friendly. In fact, here’s a free Linux-friendly open source package called Afresco which makes a better SharePoint than SharePoint.
The situation with MOSS began early: people began noticing the corporate intranet was returning a 404 “page not found” error. The event logs revealed a variety of problems with missing objects in the database SharePoint creates to support its searching facilities. Googling these errors yielded several solutions which all required being able to load the SharePoint Central Administration facility. Yet, that is itself a SharePoint site and it too was giving 404 errors.
This is where I came in. I’ll admit my SharePoint knowledge is akin to the depth of brain surgery experienced by a monkey poking a dead body with a stick. However, I do know databases and I was reasonably confident that even if the situation could not be repaired from its current state it could be set up again from scratch provided without loss provided the content databases were intact.
My belief turned out to be justified, and thankfully all was working again within several hours. It took a fresh installation, the creation of a new application, setting the blank newly-created content database offline, and re-attaching the previous content database, and the world was well again.
Yet, the installation of MOSS surprised me considerably. I’m used to critics of Linux alleging it has a cryptic and terse nature whereas, by contrast, Microsoft Windows and its family of server products are touted as being easy to use with simple graphical wizards.
It’s unfortunate Linux gets such a bad rap; modern distros like Ubuntu are rightly growing in popularity due to the increasing simplicity of their installation and configuration. Even many tools which are typically command-line driven have graphical front-ends available.
By the same token, it’s also unfortunate the Microsoft server range get such a positive standing when the claim doesn’t always hold up. In this case, the SharePoint installation is decidedly perverse.
To begin with, if you follow all the default options both incarnations of SharePoint (MOSS, and the lesser-featured free product Windows SharePoint Services, or WSS) will install the cut-down MSDE database server to manage databases. The product will not ask for confirmation, it will not test if SQL Server is installed on the machine, it will not prompt where the data ought to be stored: it will simply install MSDE and use it.
If you have SQL Server available then this is irritating; you don’t want another instance cluttering up your server – let alone hiding away, being stored under C:\Windows\SYSMSI instead of where MSDE ordinary locates itself. This said, MSDE is just a subset of SQL Server; there’s nothing stopping you using the regular SQL Server tools to connect to this database instance and administer it.
Well, almost nothing.
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