Category / IT Pro

by Simon Doy

Manage Content and Structure (An Unknown Error Occured)


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Sometimes you have got to love SharePoint, or more importantly love the developers who developed SharePoint to return an exception message such as “An unknown error occured” when something bad happens.

This message occurred when using the Site Actions->Manage Content and Structure feature.

After some investigation a couple of posts on MSDN were found these talked about checking various xml files which customise the Publishing Editing Toolbar and Site Actions toolbar.

The MSDN post said to check that the files were both checked in and published.

However, this did not fix the problem. After further investigation I could see that some lists had two entries in the View All Site Content page (/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx), both which linked to the same list. So the problem is how can we get rid of one of these links?

The first idea was to backup the list as a list template and then delete the list, however this would change the list id when a new list was created from the template.

Instead I had the idea to use the recycle bin feature to bring the list back.

Deleting and restoring the list from the recycle bin did indeed fix the duplicate list links and also fixed the Manage Content and Structure feature!

Next, is to workout why these list entries are duplicated.

by Simon Doy

Terrible VMWare Server Guest Network Performance


With SharePoint 2010 almost out, I started building a new development server using VMWare Server 2.0 running on a Windows 2008 R2 host. The details of the build will be posted on here later.
However, one of the biggest problems I faced was getting software installed on the guests. Currently I am trying to install SQL Server 2008 which was take an extrodinary longtime to install, so much so that I thought it was hanging. Eventually I decided to copy over the setup files to the guest machine. Originally the installer had been run from a share on the host, it was only when I started the copy did the problem become apparent.

The file copy speed was 10kb/s!! Obviously this is rather slow and I started to do some investigation.

There were a number of posts relating to TCP Offloading on the VMWare site however the fixes had no effect. I was disabling the TCP offloading within the guest on the Intel Pro e1000 driver.

However, it was this set of posts which lead me to solving the problem:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/bdc40358-45c8-4c4b-883b-a695f382e01a

Basically rather than disabling it on the guest you need to disable it on the host. My guest machines are all setup to use bridged networking so I disabled the TCP Offloading / Large Send Offloading (v4) for the Realtek device using Start->Network->Network and Sharing Centre. Click on the Local Network Connection->Properties->Configure (under network adapter)->Advanced->Large Send Offloading (v4) = Disabled.

Anyway hope that helps anyone else who is experiencing similar problems.

Whilst I write this post the SQL Server setup files have copied over in less than 10 mins (instead of 3 to 4 hours hurrah!)