Nixadmins.net

I logged into our SharePoint server at work today and behold, the C:\ drive was full. It had a blazing 200Mb free, out of 150Gb I might ad. I almost fell of my chair, what the hell had happened.
I started by checking out the databases, I knew I had set recovery mode to simple a while back so they wouldn’t fill up the drive with Transaction Logs. So checking folder sizes I noticed that C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\webserver extensions\12\logs was hogging over 140Gb.
What the h***?  Looking in the folder I found SHAREPOINT*.log files that were HUGE, some almost 7Gb. What’s going on here!
I tried to open a logfile, but as you might guess Notepad doesn’t open a text file that’s 7Gb. Who would want to open one anyway. What was I thinking. I guess I could sink a server by opening something that large(note to self: Trial of opening large files in controlled environment).

Google is your friend, your friend I tell you!

Fixing problems almost always involves checking online to se if someone else has run into the same problem. And behold, someone had. But not as many as I thought and the answers were a lot harder to find than I thought.
The problem seemed to have something to do with the SharePoint timer service( OWSTIMER.EXE ), so I stopped the service. Moved the logfiles to my desktop for further analysis if needed and restarted it. Seconds later I had a logfile about 50Mb in size. Stop the timer fast so I can open the logfile in Notepad.

OWSTIMER.EXE the bandit?

Reading the log showed a timed job hanging. Well to even get to the bottom of this I had to get the server logging less, the drives filled up to fast and I needed to keep the server up and running.

The next section is something you really shouldn’t do. Unless you are in a hurry and can’t afford to take the server offline.

Suppressing the logging!

Remember I said this is something you really should not do. If your server spits error logs faster than a chain gun shoots bullets you need to find the cause of it, not shut it up. Well I decided to get the logging down a notch before I get to the bottom of this, since as I said there really wasn’t a whole lot of documentation out there on this subject. And if like me you want to keep the server running during production hours and start the debugging after hours, since the server works fine for the users. The solution below,

1. Start SharePoint Central Administration
2. Go to Operations
3. Select Logging and Reporting
4. Select Diagnostic Logging
5. Under event throttling choose All as category.
6. Set least critical event to report to warning. I want to know anything that count’s as a warning or more serious than that. Unless I am debugging, and if I am I can always set the threshold lower again.
7. Set the least critical event to report to trace file to Unexpected. OWSTIMER.EXE error is giving out an Monitorable so setting it any lower and you’ll still fill up your drives.
8. Under trace log set number of logfile to something more reasonable than the default ( I had 96 files times 7Gb is quite something ), I set it at 10. And set the number of minutes to use a logfile to 60. If nothing really weird is happening 60 minutes should be ok.

Getting to the bottom of it

Sorry to say I couldn’t find the cause of this horrible logging. But I’m not going to quit searching. This post was just to save fellow administrators some time, without SharePoint filling your drive.

If you are reading this and already solved this problem, please share your fix. There might be many out there battling the same issue. And if when I find a solution to this I will be posting about it.

This is a short list of some of the most useful programs I have found for Windows. Some of these I use on a daily basis and some from time to time. One thing is true for all of them, they are free, as in free of charge. If you have favorites and great software you use in your daily work feel free to share by commenting below.

Mozilla Firefox

This one needs no introduction, as there are millions of Firefox users out there. I find Firefox the best browser out there. Firefox has many plugins that I use all the time. Some of them are

• StumleUpon, never get bored again
• FireBug, Extremely useful for web developers
• IETab, A great add-on so I don’t have to start Internet Explorer even to check if the website is compatible. And if you use Outlook Web access you can have IETab start as soon as you type in the address, goes for every site that doesn’t work in Firefox.

Firefox works and supports standards.

http://www.getfirefox.com

Windows Live Writer

If you are a fellow blogger like me this should be common knowledge. I still haven’t found a better offline editor for my Wodpress blog than this one. It supports spell check, you can preview your posts and it is quite small on resources.

What I like most is the easy way of dropping in images in posts and setting the properties of the image. If you haven’t tried it you can find it at

http://download.live.com/writer

Smart Defrag

Using Windows computers as much as I do I know how important defragmentation is. Your system will eventually clutter your drive and it will become unresponsive. Smart Defrag to the rescue.

Smart defrag is the best defragmenter I’ve found that’s free. You can set it to do scheduled defragmentation’s and it organizes your files according to how frequently you use them, so programs and files that are frequently used will be close together making the search time shorter.

http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html#

TrueCrypt

If you use USB memory sticks (and these days who doesn’t) you might want to take a look at TrueCrypt. With it you can encrypt files, folder even whole hard disks and as I said all these programs are free. I use truecrypt to keep a container for some more sensitive files on my memory stick. You can make a container and just mount it as a local disk whenever you need it. This way I can still access non sensitive material on my stick and protect the  sensitive material from prying eyes.

http://www.truecrypt.org

Paint.NET

Paint.NET is a free image editing program. Granted I don’t use this as much as I could, mostly editing screenshots but it had to get on this list because it is a brilliant light image editor. And when you don’t need a dinosaur like Photoshop then why pay for it. There are plenty of other software out there that you can sink your money into. One of them being donating to all great free software you are using. Even if donating to them always doesn’t work out as you would think se this post on codinghorror.com donating.

http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

FileZilla

Filezilla is something I found years and years ago and it is still the one FTP/SFTP client I always install on all my computers. It’s fast,easy to use and supports drag and drop in Windows. They also have a server version of FileZilla but I’m sorry to say I have never tried it out. If anyone reading this has experiences using it please comment and tell us your thoughts about the server.

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net

In closing

There are many lists of free software out there. These are the software’s I’ve been using and help me get my work done or get done faster. Your thoughts and comments are more than welcome and if you think you can replace one or more of these with something else that is free and better then please let me know.

Something I’ve been looking for a long time is a good RSS reader for my computer. Right now I am using Google Reader but something local is what I eventually want.

I’ve been hearing this song Sweet about me in the radio for some time now. I really like her voice. It’s fantastic and this song gives me cold shivers.

I just had to share this with anyone of my friends who hasn’t stopped to listen to it.

This is one of the reasons I love http://www.youtube.com. Feel free to listen to the song and I hope you’ll get as blown away as I do.

A few weeks ago I decided I needed a project or something to learn. It had to be work related but still had to be something I don’t do very often at work. So I decided it was time to take a plunge into ASP.NET 2.0.

I moved the site from Drupal to Wordpress yesterday and found a great plugin WP-Syntax to get syntax highlighting working. And what better way to learn than to write about it as you go. Writing forces you to really understand what it is that you are reading and not just skip trough chapters.

The book I got was WROX ASP.NET Professional 2.0.

Since yesterday I’ve read up to chapter 3 and I find it very interesting. I haven’t used ASP.NET since 1.1 and I have to say it has got a long way since that. Why I started with 2.0 now that 3.5 is out is simply because I had this nice pack of books at home.

Get to the point!

Well this post was just to see if the WP-Syntax plugin can handle CSharp like it should and if it does I will be writing my own introduction and thoughts around ASP.NET 2.0 as I read, learn and code. So do check back. I’ll try to keep a weekly post about ASP.NET and it should be published every weekend.

Don’t consider this something to read, it’s just a class to see the highlight in WP-Syntax. The class below has been copied from C-Sharp Stations tutorial.

// Namespace Declaration
using System;
 
// helper class
class OutputClass
{
    string myString;
 
    // Constructor
    public OutputClass(string inputString)
    {
        myString = inputString;
    }
 
    // Instance Method
    public void printString()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("{0}", myString);
    }
 
    // Destructor
    ~OutputClass()
    {
        // Some resource cleanup routines
    }
}
 
// Program start class
class ExampleClass
{
    // Main begins program execution.
    public static void Main()
    {
        // Instance of OutputClass
        OutputClass outCl = new OutputClass("This is printed by the output class.");
 
        // Call Output class' method
        outCl.printString(); 
    }
}

I’ve had problems with spam in Drupal for a while now and having my personal blog using Wordpress I noticed it handled spam a lot better. From this day nixadmins.net is running Wordpress and will move more towards a blog. I will still write articles about Linux, Administration, networking but it might also include some more personal information. Anyway, I hope you stick with me through the change and let’s hope this year will be more active than 2008.