Hotfix City

I was cleaning up a portal today and ran into a wide variety of errors. Several of them turned out to have the same root cause. The symptoms were wildly varying event errors like this:

Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerAdministrationServiceJob threw an exception:

"Message: Old format or invalid type library"

Or

Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerAdministrationServiceJob threw an exception:

"Message: Not Enough Storage"

The resolution required not one but two hotfixes, both of which target the .NET 2.0 framework.

I applied the first hotfix, KB 923028, after reading about it on Gayan Peiris' blog. After rebooting I started getting another error which read:

Unable to open shim database version registry key - v2.0.50727.00000

Err....what?  Speculating wildly here (something I'm good at), I'm guessing the "shim database" was holding some key in the windows registry that the Timer job wanted to know about but couldn't get at.

Anyhow, I did a quick search to figure out how to resolve it, and there again Gayan's blog popped up, suggesting I download and run KB 918642. I figure he was two steps ahead of me the whole way!

By the way, Gayan's the new SharePoint MVP at Microsoft in Sydney. Check out his blog here. It's got a huge amount of SharePoint fixes. Hopefully you won't need any of them!

If you're crawling case-sensitive URLs in your search catalog, such as an Apache-hosted intranet, you'll run into some strange errors. In your crawl log, you might see "Content for this URL is excluded by the server because a no-index attribute.". This implies that there is a no-index or no-follow metadata tag on the content, although there probably isn't. Further, the log will indicate the URLs as being all lower-case, when they aren't...

There is a Microsoft hot fix for this (SharePoint Hotfix, April 12 2007). The KB article is at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932619. Basically you have to call up Microsoft and ask for the download, which they will send you a link for.

Once you've installed the hotfix, go to your Shared Service provider(s)'s Search Settings. Reset all the crawled content and do a full crawl on your sources. Subsequently, the SharePoint crawler will pick up and crawl the URLs appropriately.