Plan for disaster recovery (SharePoint Server 2010)

Disaster recovery overview

For the purposes of this article, we define disaster recovery as the ability to recover from a situation in which a data center that hosts SharePoint Server becomes unavailable.

The disaster recovery strategy that you use for SharePoint Server must be coordinated with the disaster recovery strategy for the related infrastructure, including Active Directory domains, Exchange Server, and Microsoft SQL Server. Work with the administrators of the infrastructure that you rely on to design a coordinated disaster recovery strategy and plan.

The time and immediate effort to get another farm up and running in a different location is often referred to as a hot, warm, or cold standby. Our definitions for these terms are as follows:

Hot standby A second data center that can provide availability within seconds or minutes.

Warm standby A second data center that can provide availability within minutes or hours.

Cold standby A second data center that can provide availability within hours or days.

Disaster recovery can be one of the more expensive requirements for a system. The shorter the interval between failure and availability and the more systems you protect, the more complex and costly a disaster recovery solution is likely to be. When you invest in hot or warm standby data centers, costs include:

• Additional hardware and software, which often increase the complexity of operations between software applications, such as custom scripts for failover and recovery.
• Additional operational complexity.

Choose a disaster recovery strategy

Planning for cold standby data centers

Planning for warm standby data centers

Planning for hot standby data centers

System requirements for disaster recovery

Reference: technet.microsoft.com

Trick to Fresh Install Of Windows XP in 10 Minutes.

As you all know formatting and fresh Installation of Windows XP or any other MS O.S is a lengthy and boring Process but we all have to do it, sometimes in a month and sometimes in a week. It is a 40-60 minutes long process.

But friends today I will Show You how to format and fresh Install XP in Just 10 minutes.

So Let’s take a look, to perform a clean installation of Windows XP, follow these steps:

Start your computer from the Windows XP CD. To do this, insert the Windows XP CD into your CD drive or DVD drive, and then restart your computer.

Note to boot from your Windows XP CD, the BIOS settings on your computer must be configured to do this.

When you see the "Press any key to boot from CD" message, press any key to start the computer from the Windows XP CD.

At the Welcome to Setup screen, press ENTER to start Windows XP Setup.

Read the Microsoft Software License Terms, and then press F8.

Follow the instructions on the screen to select and format a partition where you want to install Windows XP.

Above all is only a normal process that you all are familiar with. The main part begins from here.

1: After the copy part is over, yours system is rebooted as we all know in general formatting procedure.
2. After reboot an image will appear. Now as the Image appears, you have to press "Shift + F10", this will open the command prompt.

3. Type TASKMGR in command prompt. This will open the Task Manager.
4. After the task manager Opens Go to Processes- > Find "Setup.exe" process and Right click on It-> Set the priority to highest.

5. Just wait and watch, the set-up will be completed in 2 minutes to 9 minutes. This varies from system to system performance.

Note: I have not given it a try to MS other O.S such as windows Server 2003, Server 2008, Server 2012, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Try this and share your comments.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you.

Solution Package retracting stuck: SharePoint 2007

Problem: We were planning to deploy a new solution for one of our web application. However, as we all know we have to first retract the solution from the web application and for that we use the stsadm command line given below,

stsadm -o retractsolution -name solutionName.wsp –immediate

followed by STSADM -o execadmsvcjobs

We have waited for min 20 min, but after refreshing the CA for many times we have seen the solution was stuck in retract state.

Troubleshooting: We checked the status of ‘Windows SharePoint Services Solution Retraction for’ timer job and It was successful for all of the servers we have in the environment.

To check the status of the above timer service,

1. Go to Central Administration
2. Navigate to Operations > "Global Configuration" > "Timer job status".
3. Look for Jobs name starting with either "Windows SharePoint Services Solution Retraction for".

Resolution: we have tried running ‘execadmsvsjobs’ STSADM command.

STSADM -o execadmsvcjobs ( On all the servers )  

To all of the servers in the env. And refreshing CA the status of the solution package was ‘not deployed’.

Some other things you can also try to resolve the problems are.

Ø  Restarting the OWSTIMER Service.

Ø  Deleting the Job Timer Definition for some reasons resolves it.

Ø  Restarting the machine and try one more time.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you.

How To Setup Direct LAN Connection Using Bluetooth

You may come in the situation when you’ve two computers but no WiFi adapters in it. In such condition you can try cheap method to share files between two computers using Bluetooth. In this tutorial I am going to teach you how to achieve such heights.

To allow file and Printer sharing names each computer with a unique name but give both computers the same workgroup name. You can do this from the System Properties window. To open System Properties, go to My computer, right click on any blank area and choose properties. Or simply you can right click on my computer icon and choose properties.

In Computer Name tab click Change to input your computer name and workgroup name. You will be asked to restart your computer after the computer name and workgroup change.

The computer name defined in this step becomes the Bluetooth device name for this computer that will be displayed on another computer this computer is discovered.

Now plug in Bluetooth adapters to both of your computer. Make sure that Bluetooth device is properly installed on both of your PC’s properly by going to device manager.

Verify that the Bluetooth adapter is identified as a Bluetooth Network Connection under Personal Area Network with Microsoft’s Bluetooth stack driver while on the second computer with third-party Bluetooth stack driver; it is identified as a Local Area Connection under LAN or High-Speed Internet.

Make the second Bluetooth-enabled computer discoverable by going to Bluetooth settings and configure its “service properties” to include PAN Networking service.

In the first computer, right click on Bluetooth taskbar icon and select “Join a Personal Area Network” to open Bluetooth Personal Area Network window.

You can also do this by going to Network Connections and right-clicking the icon and select “View Bluetooth Network Devices” or clicking View Bluetooth Network Devices link on the left sidebar.

On the Bluetooth Personal Area Network window, click “Add” to open the “Add Bluetooth Device Wizard” if the second computer hasn’t been connected before.

Now we’re done with setting up the basic things. Now we’ll have to pair the devices.
On the Add Bluetooth Device Wizard, tick “My device is set up and ready to be found”. Click Next.

Wizard will search for Bluetooth devices in range.

Select the second computer and click next.

You will be asked to input a passkey or PIN code before starting a connection to the second computer. You can create your own passkey or let Windows create a random passkey for you. Click Next.

On the second computer, you will be prompted to input a passkey. Type the same passkey as the one created on the first computer and cick OK.

If the everything went well, you’ll be welcomed to next page with Finish button enabled. Click Finish. You will be back to the Bluetooth Personal Area Network window. Now the second computer is listed under Direct Connections. Select it and click Connect to start a Personal Area Network connection.

Now, both computers have been directly connected in a Personal Area Network. First computer with Microsoft stack is the Client while the second one with Thirdparty stack is the host.

Now you can share files same like in LAN but with slower bandwidth

Hope this tutorial was helpful.

Add, Deploy, Remove and Delete Solutions in SharePoint 2010

What is solution package?

A solution package is a distribution package that delivers your custom SharePoint Server 2010 development work to the Web servers or the application servers in your server farm.

-Adding and Deploying Solutions in SharePoint 2010-

·         How to add solution package SharePoint 2010?

·         How to add a .WSP in SharePoint 2010?

Add solution with STSADM: stsadm.exe -o addsolution -filename yoursolutionpackage.wsp

Add solution with PowerShell: Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath <SolutionPath>

-Deploy Solution in SharePoint 2010-

·         Deploy Solution using Central Administration

·         Deploy Solution using stsadm.exe

·         Deploy Solution using PowerShell

Deploy Solution using Central Administration

·         Central Administration

·         System Settings

·         Manage farm solutions

·         Now click your solution from the list (for example, yoursolutionname.wsp).

·         Now click Deploy Solution and select the web application where you want to deploy the solution (example, http://sp-mach here), Click OK when you are done.

·         Click Deploy Solution

·         You are done with deployment.

Deploy Solution using STSADM.EXE

stsadm -o deploysolution -name yoursolutionpackagename.wsp -url http://sp-mach/ -local  -force

Here (-URL) means the web application where to deploy the solution.

Deploy Solution using PowerShell

Install-SPSolution -Identity <SolutionName> -WebApplication <URLname>

§  <SolutionName> is the name of the solution.

§  <URLname> is the URL of the Web application to which you want to deploy the imported solution.

Uninstallation and Retraction of a Solution in SharePoint 2010

Follow the steps for STSADM:

Open command prompt and navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN

Use the stsadm command = stsadm -o retractsolution -name solutionName.wsp -immediate

And then remove the wsp = stsadm -o deletesolution -name solutionName.wsp

Follow the steps for PowerShell:

Go to All Programs --Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products --SharePoint 2010 Management Shell --Run as administrator

Uninstall-SPSolution -identity solutionName.wsp

Remove-SPSolution -identity solutionName.wsp

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you.