Using a custom stylesheet in MOSS 2007

Lately I’m working a lot with Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. To customize the look of a Sharepoint site you can achieve a lot by customizing the CSS. When you load this CSS in your site this CSS will overwrite the standard CSS. I wanted to make an article about how to do it, but why would I do this if there is already a great article out there written by Shane Perran. It’s called Kickstart to editing styles in MOSS 2007 and it describes perfectly how to do it. Here is a small excerpt:

Set up an Alternate CSS URL:

• Create a Publishing Site. Select Site Actions, Create Site. Then select the Publishing Tab and finally choose Publishing Site. It will take a few moments for your site to provision.
• Open your editor of choice and create a new file and add /* Custom Styles */ to it.
• Save it as “Custom.CSS”. If you are using notepad don’t forget to select “All Files” from the “Save as Type” drop down menu before saving, otherwise you will have a .txt extension.

Read the rest here at Kickstart to editing styles in MOSS 2007.

IE Developer Toolbar doesn’t show DOM tree in IE7

To customize the look of a Sharepoint site you can achieve a lot by making a CSS which overrides the standard CSS (on that subject more later). To determine what part of the standard stylesheet I have to override the IE Developer Toolbar is an absolute must have.

However when installing in Internet Explorer 7 it didn’t show me the DOM tree in the left screen. This worked flawless in Internet Explorer 6 so I was a bit surprised about the empty screen.

I looked around on the internet and though the solution is out there I didn’t see a clear answer. So this is a reminder for myself and hopefully for more people out there looking for the solution. To enable the DOM tree you need to ‘Enable’ the option Script ActivX controls marked safe for scripting. This can be found in Tools > Internet Options > Security Tab > Custom level....

Here you have to scroll down a bit and then you can put Script ActivX controls marked safe for scripting to enable and after you do a restart of Internet Explorer the IE Developer Toolbar should be fully functional.

Windows Server 2008 DHCP server assigns broadcast adresses

Not long ago we expanded the range of our network segments. This meant reconfiguring our DHCP server to assign IP addresses using the new ranges. While normally if you configure a 255.255.255.0 segment it isn’t possible to set the address range to x.x.x.0 to x.x.x.255. Those x.x.x.0 and x.x.x.255 addresses are normally used for broadcast messages and so they can’t be assigned.

Now when we wanted to set the ranges to 255.255.252.0 the address ranges got expanded from x.x.x.1 to x.x.x+3.254. However we couldn’t select x.x.x.0 or x.x.x+3.255 to be within the range, but we could select the range to be from x.x.x.1 to x.x.x+3.254. Since Windows DHCP server was smart enough to not include the broadcast addresses in the 255.255.255.0 mask I thought it wouldn’t assign the broadcast addresses in the 255.255.252.0 range either.

However when I looked at the DHCP leases it was assigning those addresses to computers. Addresses like x.x.x.255 or x.x.x+1.0 were assigned to computers making them not able to use the network as it should. So what I did was add every x.x.x+[1,2,3].0 and x.x.x+[0,1,2].255 within the range to the exclusion list and deleted the leases from the DHCP server. This way those broadcast addresses wouldn’t be assigned to workstations and the network connections would work perfectly again.

Hypervisor war in virtual land

Not so long ago (14th of December) Mohammed Fawzi posted a blogpost called Hyper-V vs VMWare. In this post he wanted to put together a comparison of Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMWare’s ESX (Enterprise). Although I don’t think he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish with that post (comparing the two hypervisors), he managed to accomplish something. And that something is what is not in the article itself, but in the comments beneath it. It started a really firm, mostly technical and sometimes even emotional, response of the community that he was comparing apples with grapes and doing it all wrong.

The replies didn’t even stop at Mohammed Fawzi’s blogpost, but even resulted in new articles stating the faults he made when he compared the two. The writers (Scott Lowe and Jason Boche) of those articles are writers whose blogposts I read with great care and are (in my opinion) really interesting.

This rumble in hypervisor land remembered me at the console wars where fanboys were flaming that their console is the best and the rest of the gaming consoles were rubbish. Although the comments and articles really don’t represent the behaviour of those fanboys flaming about their favourite console, I recognised some of the emotions that appeared and how heavily the community reacted on it.

I myself work a lot with HP equipment and use VMWare ESX as my hypervisor and I think it was the best solution in my situation. Just as with gaming consoles I believe the best hypervisor is the one that fits best in your situation. And above all I like the idea of more than one choice in hypervisor land. It will keep everyone awake and new functions will be developed to have that one unique selling point.

What the community doesn’t need is a break because there isn’t a trustworthy datasource. What the community does need is a factual datasheet comparing the two so that when we have to make that choice or when we have to write that business case we all have the facts. I like to know what Microsoft is doing and how it solves problems with their solution as well as how VMWare does those things. I hope I can learn from that and one day I can use that to my advantage and solve a problem or make the correct decision using all my knowledge.

The only question that remains is: Who is going to make that factual datasheet that is trustworthy?

Black background at the login screen

! Warning: Editing the registry is a tricky thing. If you change something important you might destroy your Windows. The author of this article is in no way responsible for any damage caused!

Our mailserver experienced a weird phenomenon today. Whenever we wanted to log in, the input boxes of the login screen were black and so was the title in the window header. After some searching and finding this useful Microsoft KB 906510, I was pointed to the registry and specifically to the location HKU\.Default\Control Panel\Colors. I applied the workaround from the Microsoft KB (which was exporting the registry keys from a healthy server and then importing them to the mailserver) and it worked again.

I got interested and was questioning myself what all the keys did in HKU\.Default\Control Panel\Colors. So for me and those who are interested a list of all the keys, their default values (for Windows Server 2003) and what specific part they affect (the ones I could quickly find).

Installing MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008

When I was trying to install MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 I ran into an error stating that there is a known compatibility issue with this version and that I should install it with the latest service pack. After a quick search I ran into a blogpost from Matt Hester who ran into the same problem. He posted a really good screencast about installing MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008.

The solution is really simple. You just have to slipstream WSS 3.0 SP1 and MOSS 2007 SP1 into the install CD. The first step you take is copying the install CD onto your local hard drive. After you have done that you can download the service packs from the Microsoft website. When the downloads are finished you run both of the setups with the parameter /extract:[pathtoinstallcd] (replace [pathtoinstallcd] with the full path to the location you copied your MOSS 2007 install CD).

If you executed the steps correctly you can now run the setup and start installing MOSS 2007.

Excel error at startup

At work we got some calls that when starting Excel an error message appeared. It was saying that a class is not registered and it was looking for an object with CLSID: {AC9F290-E877-11CE-9F68-00AA00574A4F}. 

 

After some searching I found a Microsoft KB article 182500 stating that fm20.dll might be missing or incorrectly registered. This KB applied to Excel 97, but apparently it was still happening in Excel 2000. In my case fm20.dll only needed to be registered with the command regsvr32.exe fm20.dll, which I started from the run window. 

I pressed OK and a notification came up saying the dll was succesfully registered. When I started Excel the error was dissapeared.