Category: Information Technology

… And Now For the Rest of the Story

Subtitled: Everything I forgot to mention in the previous post due to time constraints and memory overload.

I did lend a hand, at least temporarily, with reviewing and tweaking the old Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop.  I manually removed over 10,000 files from the temp folder after which my dad showed his brother how to use Window’s built in Disk Cleanup utility.  The laptop has only 512 MB of RAM, but could probably benefit from a memory upgrade to 2 GB if possible.  Both dad and uncle are pricing RAM this week.  The hard drive is anemic at 30 GB (and Office 2007 is fully loaded on it) and is using compression (ugh!).  Without more time and some of my normal utilities, I couldn’t accurately predict if turning off compression would result in a fully utilized hard drive (i.e. no free disk space for Windows to operate ‘normally’).  Granted, the laptop is over seven years old, so I’m not much that gone be done to improve performance without dumping too much money into it.  As with most electronics, it’s sometimes better to cut your losses and jump to new and improved hardware.  I suggested a netbook if 90% of their needs involve internet access (webmail, Googling, weather, news, etc.).

My uncle and I (both avid readers and he’s also an aspiring author) swapped several pounds worth of books.  I’ll do the inventory this evening and start sorting for swapping and trading via BookMooch and my local used book store.  My dad gave us both the evil eye, since I somehow ended up with about twice as many books on the return trip to squeeze into his car, along with the telescope and me.

I spied and watched some local fauna, including a large woodchuck, a small green and gray toad and a pasture of self-shedding sheep and their well trained unsupervised sheepdog.  On the ride down to Winfield, we saw many red tailed hawks in the pre-dawn life puffed up like owls, but later in the morning they were sleek or fast as the glided over the planes in search of breakfast.

And we ruminated squeaky floors and their cures and the consensus became you must pull up your flooring, use screws (not nails) and possible some glue to quiet those squeaks.

 

 

KCOG October Meeting: Upgrading Sharepoint (2007 to 2010)

After my fourth day of training in SQL Server 2005 (at the New Horizons Computer Learning Center in the Metro South Mall in Overland Park), I stayed in the area to attend the October meeting of KCOG (Kansas City Office Geeks) held at yet another training facility (Centriq on State Line Road).

The presenter was Karthik Venkataraman of Rishi Solutions and he gave a short presentation and demo on upgrading SharePoint 2007 to 2010.  The demo failed (of course) because the prerequisites for upgrading are steep, including Windows 2008 64-bit along with MOSS 2007 SP2.

The most promising avenue of upgrade I witnessed was the Database Attach method.  This may coincide with our plans at work to stand up brand new servers (especially since 64-bit architecture is required) and re-install/re-configure OneView in parallel with our production SharePoint system.  A second learning/preparing step includes running the command STSADM -o preupgradecheck on the 2007 system and documenting all your customizations (especially those that do NOT reside in the database, but rather live in the file system on your SharePoint server).

The basic steps for the Database Attached method include:

  • Backup and Restore your SharePoint database (using a different name for the restored copy, so you don’t overwrite, unless you literally intend to detach/attach to a different SQL Server)
  • Run PowerShell command: Test-SPContentDatabase on an empty web app in SharePoint 2010 and fix issues.  (basically, you setup new servers and install SharePoint 2001 new, then create a web app but do NOT create a site collection)
  • After fixing the issues reported from the last command, run either STSADM -o addcontentdb (with appropriate command line switches for your SharePoint database) or the PowerShell command Mount-SPContentDatabase

The list above is not comprehensive so please do your research (learn and prepare) and test, test, test!

And don’t forget the five steps to any upgrade process:  Learn, Prepare, Test (the most important step), Implement and Validate.

It will be several months before I get to learn this method in a test environment, but I’m so looking forward to SharePoint 2010.