Fixing HRESULT 0x80040D23

I’ve been playing around with a fresh install of SharePoint 2007 Standard on my home server via Remote Desktop at work today and fixing small problems as they came up. One of the bigger problems I ran into was when trying to access the “Search Settings” pages via the “Shared Services Administration” pages. When I tried to do this, I got the following rather cryptic error message:

Exception from HRESULT : 0x80040D23

My curiosity piqued, I started checking various things.

  1. Was the search service running according to SharePoint? Going to Central Administration => Farm Topology and clicking on the server name showed that the search service was indeed started.
  2. Was the search service running according to Windows Server 2003? Going to Start > Administrative Tools > Services and looking at the “Office SharePoint Server Search” service showed the service as stopped, but it intermittently tried to start itself. Manually starting it gave the following error:

    Error 183: Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

  3. Checking the Application event viewer via Start > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer showed a whole bunch of application error messages originating from SharePoint. I emptied out the event log and tried starting the service again, which gave me the following informational entry:
    Event Type:	Information
    Event Source:	MSSQL$OFFICESERVERS
    Event Category:	(2)
    Event ID:	17137
    Date:		8/30/2007
    Time:		12:43:31 PM
    User:		NT AUTHORITYNETWORK SERVICE
    Computer:	CAERYN
    Description: Starting up database 'SharedServices1_Search_DB_dfea8'.
  4. This made me wonder about what the permissions on the database were. Opening SQL Server Management Studio Express, I pulled up the properties on the indicated database, which shows that that particular user actually did have at least connect access to the database. I suspected that this wasn’t enough, though, so I went into the Properties tab for Office SharePoint Server Search, went to the “Log On” tab, and changed the account used to the same account that owned the search database.

Voila, the service started properly and I could access the Search Settings pages!

New Blog Template!

I’ve launched my new blog template, as promised. Hopefully, it works well – if you notice anything, please do shoot me an e-mail (with screenshot and browser/OS information, if possible) so that I can fix it. I ran it through browsershots.org and was fairly satisfied with the results, but it hasn’t yet been tested on a Mac.

Some credit is due here – thanks to the following resources:

I’m hoping this redesign makes everything much more consistent.

Blog Postings with Postie

I’m now using the Postie plugin to post to this blog by mail. I had to modify it, though, since it handles colons (:) in mail subjects in a fairly counterintuitive way: by assigning everything before the colon as the post category. Since it also supports the ability to specify category names in brackets ([SharePoint 2007], for instance, to post to that category), this meant that the colon processing incorrectly dropped that information. Thus, I had to edit the postie-functions.php file and comment out lines 1507-1510, which control how colons are processed.

It seems to work fairly well, though plain text e-mails with breaks post weirdly. This post is testing the HTML formatting abilities, which should work perfectly.

Update: Subsite Searches in SharePoint Not Working

We’re not the only ones having problems with subsite searches – apparently, the University of Washington’s SharePoint install suffers from the same issue. They’re working with Microsoft and have a ticket open, but I’m shocked that with the number of people who have this issue, no solution has yet been found.

We’ll see whether anything in particular happens as a result of our open ticket with Microsoft.

What’s been going on with my bus?

I think I finally figured out what’s been going on with Metro’s route 372 (Woodinville P&R to University of Washington) in the mornings. Before today, I always made it out to the stop by about 8:25AM or so and managed to catch the bus about 8:30AM, which got me on campus on time for work at 9. However, yesterday, I got stuck waiting until 8:40, which made me ten minutes late for work.

Of course, this prompted a check of the time schedules Metro posts for that route – there are two arrivals: one at 8:15AM and one at 8:40AM (the 8:15 is the one I took in this morning, which was on time). So why was it that standing there at 8:25 let me catch the 372 at 8:30? Either the 8:15 ran 15 minutes late for over a month (I started riding in July, and yesterday was the first time I got stung), or the 8:40 was/is chronically 10 minutes early. Either way, this is completely against their time schedules and led me to think that it was actually an 8:30 bus.

Good going, Metro.

File Servers: Dead? Not Really.

Joel Oleson (a member of the MS SharePoint Products and Technologies Team) wrote earlier this year on whether the file server is dead or not. A lot of the points he makes about what should and shouldn’t be stored on SharePoint servers are fairly obvious – don’t do application or hotfix rollouts using SharePoint, for example – but some of them were a bit surprising or at least worth mentioning.

  • Storing SQL databases as a SharePoint object doesn’t really make sense; linking these in via the Business Data Catalog functionality does.
  • Just because Access 2007 files can be stored in SharePoint doesn’t mean they should be stored in SharePoint. This depends largely on the complexity of the database and how it’s used.
  • Direct quote: “Access 2003 databases should not be stored in SharePoint document libraries where multiple users need to edit the access database simultaneously.”
  • SharePoint is not developer source control, though the terminology and functionality is roughly the same.
  • If Excel spreadsheets have data that cross different spreadsheets, this may cause issues due to how file paths are encoded when those dependencies are created.
  • File storage: cheap. SharePoint storage: expensive relative to the cost of file storage (since almost everything’s stored in a database).
  • Basically, if it’s a collaborative file share, SharePoint can replace it. However, if it’s simply file storage, this may not be cost-effective.

Joel has a follow-up post here – some further bullets:

  • Having users completely copy over all their private documents into My Sites or Team Sites isn’t what you want to have happen.

There are plenty of others talking about the same subject (see the links Joel provides). This additional commentary isn’t bad.

Subsite Searches in SharePoint Not Working

We’ve been having a search configuration problem within SharePoint 2007 at work in which the “This Site” and “This List” search scopes available within any site haven’t been returning results, despite the fact that the global site search will very clearly return results with the exact same query. This seems to be an issue that several people have on TechNet’s Sharepoint – Search forums. A bit of digging discovers a recent post by Robin Meuré, which suggests that using https:// (SSL) might be the issue. I’m a bit dubious, but I’m running it by our system administrator to see if it even makes any sense.