After spending some time work on the farm the last couple of days I got back to cleaning up miscellanous items on Sharepoint and Fedora. Here are the Fedora updates:

1. On Fedora I confirmed that my configuration has problems with userids. If I enter a userid that is used on the windows network, Fedora cannot validate the password. If I create a userid that is not on the windows network, it uses the local password.
2. Since I was installing an updated kernel I finally found the instructions on how to remove the old kernels from the system and Grub. “rpm -qa | grep kernel” will list the kernels and “rpm -e xxxx” will remove them.
3. I installed Tsclient and tested it to the server. It works fine although there are some error messages you don't see when you run rdesktop.

Here are the Sharepoint updates:

1. I finally installed Adobe's Ifilter so I can index Acrobat files in Sharepoint.
2. I rebuilt the indexes since I already had pdf files in Sharepoint using a stored procedure.”USE STS_xxx_1″ and “EXEC sp_fulltext_catalog 'ix_STS_xxx_1','rebuild'” I got this info off on msd2d.com.
3. I opened up anonymous access. I can now get in from Fedora using Mozilla and cranking up Openoffice 1.1. This is not exactly the combination Microsoft wants you to use but to Microsoft's credit it does work.

I have switched over to RSS Bandit. I imported my subscriptions from Radio and I am off and running. The big things I like are categories and the browser tab. Once I assigned my feeds to a category I can click on a category and view a mixed list of all of the feeds. This allows me to be more efficient in my scanning of feeds. When I am done with a category I can mark them all as read by pressing Ctrl-M. The browser tab is also very convenient. The drawbacks I have found is sometimes it goes into limbo land when you try to follow a link and I would like to post to Radio from it.

Since I have .Net installed I decided to give RSS Bandit a whirl. I have used Radio for a fairly long time and am pretty happy with it. RSS Bandit is much nicer though. I wish I could post to my Radio weblog through it. I particulary like the tabbed windows for following links.

I spent a lot of time trying to work around a security issue with my windows sharepoint installation. It has a authentification problem I have not been able to figure out. I should have complete access to the site but I keep getting asked for my userid and password when I use FrontPage to open a page. The bad part is that it says I do not have permission and does not like my userid/password. It doesn't like any userid/password combination and the failed login does not appear in any log file. I do not have a problem modifying the share page and adding webparts.

Speaking of webparts I finally found and added some more webparts. They add a little navigation help. The problem is that I want to use them on the document list to improve navigation. Some of them work as expected and some don't. You get what you pay for. Sigh!

“Thank you for your interest in the Microsoft® Office FrontPage® 2003 Customization Kit for Microsoft® SharePoint™ Products and Technologies. At this time, we are updating and refreshing the content on this site, so the complete kit is unavailable for your use at this time. We expect the new site to be launched within the next 2 weeks. We appreciate your patience, and hope you will check back for the new site in the coming weeks.“

I browsed the examples and downloaded the finance one. It looks like it is missing the weblog part. I will have to customize the theme but the parts that are included should give me a great start. I hope they add some more web parts! This could be a really neat sales demo.

Windows Sharepoint is an interesting animal. It is a poor man's content management system. It competes and conflicts with the existing file systems. The database backend breaks the normal file system tools(e.g. search), features(e.g. default editor), and backup. I feel Sharepoint has the potential to be much more than the filesystem but I am still searching for the reasons.

The problem was that the SBS2K3 server was not synchronizing. I was getting messages in the event log about bad data received(Event ID 38). I had just gotten my Fedora box to synchronize with a NTP so the I knew the port was open. The packet filter log said the SBS to NTP communication setup was blocked. So I went back to the IP packet filter and noticed the default SBS filter for NTP was setup to use TCP. The instructions I had previously used for SBS2K was to create the packet filter with UDP and Send Receive. I set it per the instructions and it worked.

I finally got around to fixing the Fax server. The service was stopped and would not start. I don't use it so I let its repair slip while I worked on more important issues. I removed it and then installed it again. It works fine now. All of my “automatic starting” services should now be working.

I don't know whether my previous ISA installation was gummed up but this firewall version is asking me to authenticate myself to run my virus checking update and java update on the server. Just when I thought I had ISA down pat I get severely humbled with a variety of gotchas. I thought it was happy knowing the IP address.

“At a high level, all you need to do is get the icon into the \template\images directory, and then map the extension to the icon in \template\xml\docicon.xml. Then you reset IIS, and voilà, you have your mapping.“

This works! Read the post for more details.