SharePoint 2013 People Picker error: “Sorry, we’re having trouble reaching the server"

Issue Description

I was working on a SharePoint 2013 site and trying to add some users and got the below error

I tried adding the same user on other site collections but same error.

Also checked the Event Logs but couldn’t find anything useful

Fix

I did an IISRESET and this fixed the issue

How to retrieve a List of Application Pools in a Server

From the UI

1. Open IIS Manager. For information about opening IIS Manager, see Open IIS Manager (IIS 7).

2. In the Connections pane, click Application Pools in the tree.

From Command Line

1. Open command prompt.

2. Type "cd C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv" [Appcmd.exe exists at the location %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\]

3. Type "appcmd list apppool"

SharePoint 2013: The server was unable to save the form at this time. Please try again.

Error Description

When I am trying to save data on any list in the farm I got the below error

The server was unable to save the form at this time. Please try again.

Fix

An IISRESET fixed the issue.

Unable to process the request . Wait a few minutes and try performing this operation again

Issue Description

Recently I came across this issue where some of the end users were getting an error message when they tried to open an Excel file in SharePoint in the browser.

Unable to process the request.

Wait a few minutes and try performing this operation again.

Cause

The Excel Services Application server computer is in a non-valid state and may need to be restarted.

Resolution

Most of the online articles were asking me to restart the Central Administration server.I did not want to do that and found a different fix.

Identify the application pool running the Excel Services service application (from IIS) and Recycle it.

1) Start –>Run –> inetmgr

2) Under the Sites click on SharePoint Web Services. This will list down the Services in SharePoint.

3) Click on each GUID –> Change the view from Features View to Content View

4) On finding ExcelService.asmx -> Right click that web service -> Manage Application -> Advanced Settings.

5) Identify the Application Pool (make a note of this).

6) Now in IIS –> Application Pools –> choose the Application Pool you noted down in previous step   -> Recycle (recycle the application pool).

An exception occurred when trying to issue security token: The HTTP service located at http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc/actas is too busy.

There was an unexpected server reboot for our applications server and our service application features were failing. On checking, I noticed the below error in the Windows Event Viewer

Event ID: 8306

An exception occurred when trying to issue security token: The HTTP service located at http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc/actas is too busy.

On browsing to http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc ,  I got the below error

Fix

Identify the application pool for the Service Applications.

Application Pool -> Check Status -> Start

ULS log Event ID 5240 “There was an error in communicating with Excel Calculation Services”

Issue Description

Recently I came across this issue where some of the end users were getting an error message when they tried to open an Excel file in SharePoint in the browser.

Unable to process the request.

Wait a few minutes and try performing this operation again.

- On checking the ULS logs I got the below error message.

ULS log Event ID 5240 “There was an error in communicating with Excel Calculation Services”

- On checking the Event Viewer on the server , there was the below error.

Event 2159, SharePoint Server

Event 5240 (Excel Services Application) of severity Error occurred 20 more time(s) and was suppressed in the event log

Cause

The Excel Services Application server computer is in a non-valid state and may need to be restarted.

Resolution

Most of the online articles were asking me to restart the Central Administration server.I did not want to do that and found a different fix.

Identify the application pool running the Excel Services service application (from IIS) and Recycle it.

1) Start –>Run –> inetmgr

2) Under the Sites click on SharePoint Web Services. This will list down the Services in SharePoint.

3) Click on each GUID –> Change the view from Features View to Content View

4) On finding ExcelService.asmx -> Right click that web service -> Manage Application -> Advanced Settings.

5) Identify the Application Pool (make a note of this).

6) Now in IIS –> Application Pools –> choose the Application Pool you noted down in previous step   -> Recycle (recycle the application pool).

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {BDEADEE2-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

Issue Description

I was getting the above error while browsing to Central Administration

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID (BDEADEE2- C265- .11 DO- SCED- OOAOC9OAB5OFJ failed due to the following error: 800703 fa.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where ¡t originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Runtime.lnteropservices.COMException: Retrieving the COM class factory for component wh CLSID (ODEADEE2-C265-1 I DO-BCED-OOAOC9OAOSOF)failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Inforniation regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[COMException (0x800703fa): Retrieving the C0M class factory for component with CLSID {BDEADEE2-C265-llDO-BCED-OOAOC9OABSOF} failed due to the following error: 800703f a.]

Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest. .ctorO tiO4

Microsoft.SharePoint.SPGlobal.CreatesPRequestAndSetldentity(Boolean bNotGlobalAdminCode, String strUrl , Sedean bNotAddToContext, Byte[] UserToken, String userName, Soolean blgnoreTokenTimeout, Soolean bAsAnonyntus) ÷238

Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb.InitializeSPRequest() .455

Microsoft. SharePoi nt. SPWeb. EnsureSPRequestQ ÷75

Microsoft. SharePoi nt. SPWeb. get_Request() ÷74

Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SPControl .SPwebEnsureSPControl(HttpContext context) +613

Microsoft.Sharepoint.WebControls.SPControl .c5etContextweb(HttpContext context) .41

Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPRequestModule.PostResolveRequestCacheHandler(Object osender, EventArgs ea) ÷595

System.Web.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +80

System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) ÷171

Version Informdtion: Microsoft NET Framework Version:2.O.50727.4234; ASP.NET Yersion:2.U.5U727.4223

Resolution

Perform an IISRESET on all the web servers in the farm.

Redirecting an IIS (7.0) Website

1. Go to IIS Manager (inetmgr). Select the server name-> Expand the servername -> Expand Sites -> Select the IIS website

2. Click on the Features View (on the right hand side)

3. Below IIS ->double click on HTTP Redirect

4. Check Redirect requests to this destination. Enter the URL to where you want to redirect the users

5. Check Redirect all requests to exact destination (instead of relative to destination)

6. On the Actions tab ->click Apply and save the changes.

IIS Logs location

I had checked this out in IIS 8.0

The default path would be on C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles if C: is the primary partition

Sharepoint 2010 Upload Size Limit - IIS7 and Windows Server2008

In Sharepoint 2010, though you increase the file upload limits from Central Administration (to more than 50 MB), you wouldn’t be able to upload files more than 28MB. You would get an error whenever you try to upload a file of size greater than 28MB.It is the default IIS configurations that is giving these errors. When you are running Windows SharePoint Services on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that has IIS 7.0, you would not be able to upload files that are larger than 28MB even though you have configured the large file upload settings.

We will have to manually change some values in IIS to fix this issue.

By default these are the values for upload limit in

SharePoint Server 2010: 50 MB

IIS 7: 30 MB

Follow the below steps to fix this issue:

1) Increase the SharePoint Item Upload Limit from Central Administration

Browse to Central Administration -> Manage Web Applications ->Select web application -> General Settings -> Change the Maximum upload size -> Click OK

2) Increase the IIS 7 request limits

Navigate to IIS Manager -> Select the local host -> Choose Request Filtering -> Edit Feature Settings -> Change the value for Maximum allowed content length(Bytes)

3) Increase the IIS7 connection timeout length (optional)

If you need to upload large files, there are chances that the connection times out depending on your internet speed. If you want, you can increase the connection timeout to a larger value. The standard is 120 seconds. If you have users with low speed internet connections, increase this value.

Navigate to IIS Manager -> Select the Web Application -> Manage Web Site -> Advanced Settings ->Expand Connection Limits ->Change Connection Time-out (seconds)

Sharepoint Zone Implementation

Continued from Sharepoint Web Application Zones

To implement Sharepoint Zones, we need to extend an existing web application.

1) Browse to Central Administration -> Manage Web Applications.

2) Now select the web application where you want to implement a different zone click on Extend on the ribbon.In our case I am selecting the web application on port 1000(the screenshot shows port 80,ignore it)

3) Enter the values for your new extended web application. Select a zone for your web application.

4) The zones available for a default web application are shown below.

5) In our case, I am clicking Intranet and click OK.

6) Now Browse to Central Administration -> Configure Alternate Access Mappings.

 7) You get to see that your Web application is created in a new zone (Intranet).From now on, you would be able to access your site collections from both ports 1000 and 1001.(Alternate Access Mappings)

8) Go to the IIS manager now You will see a new IIS website created for your extended web application (in the new zone).

Manage Web Applications Error : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I tried to extend an existing web application by selecting it and I got the below error.

Error

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Correlation ID: 419ad46b-8c99-4424-8fba-7b9b2d575e80

Date and Time: 11/9/2012 4:59:30 PM

I am not too sure why this happened.

But this went off after I did an IISRESET.

Sharepoint Web Application Zones

    Zones provide different logical paths (URL's) to access the same web application. Multiple zone usage allows implementing different access and policy conditions for users. Zones provide a way of using different authentication methods for the same site. In Sharepoint, each web application has 5 zones:

• Default
• Intranet
• Internet
• Custom
• Extranet                                                                                                                                                                   

Zones provide a method to partition users by: 

• Authentication type (Windows Authentication/Kerberos)
• Network zone (Intranet/Internet/Extranet)
• Policy permissions (Allow or Deny Read-Write access)

Whenever a web application is created, it is created in the Default zone (by default).We will have to extend the web application to other zones if needed. We can implement any of these zones for the web application. You cannot have the same zone twice for the same web application. If you check in IIS Manager, each zone implementation of the web application would have its own IIS web site. But don’t forget that in actual, all these refer the same Sharepoint site. You might be extending your website to create a new IIS web application, but for Sharepoint it is just another URL pointing to the same web application with the same set of site collections. Now by extending a web application to multiple zones, users access the same site through separate and independent URLs, each having its own web.config file. Each zone is configured with its own load-balanced URL (protocol, host header, and port).

So in effect, a content change to any of these sites means, it will reflect in all zones. This is because the all these zones are getting data from the same content database. YES...that is right.

Related Post: Sharepoint Zone Implementation/Extending Web Applications

SharePoint Host Named Site Collections

      I was never aware of this feature(Host Named Site Collections) in Sharepoint until 2-3 years back. I got the buzzword from one of my seniors. I did some reading about it and forgot about it as I never had a use for it. Recently I stumbled over this again and this time I thought of trying it out in one of my development VM's.

So to begin with......what is a Host Named Site Collection (HNSC)

Host Named Site Collection (going forward, I will be using HNSC) is the best option if you want to create multiple root-level site collections within a web application. (i.e. unique URL for your site collections. Cool……right? That is what I thought so)

In SharePoint, we have support for both path-based & HNSC.The basic difference is: 

All path-based site collections in a Web application share the same host name (DNS name), whereas each HNSC in a Web application is assigned with a unique DNS name.

In simple words:

HNSC allows you to create as many root-level host-named sites within a single Web application.

http://newsite.customer.com

http://www.testhnsc1.com

With path-based sites, you are limited to a single root-level site collection within a Web application

http://www.fahad.com/sites/site1

http://www.fahad.com/sites/site2

So....yeah...we can have HNSC. But with it come some advantages and disadvantages.

Advantage/Dis-advantages:

Host Named Site Collection (HNSC)

·         We can have fancy URLs for our site collections. We have more control over URLs.

·         Host headers cannot be applied at the Web application (IIS site) level, and doing so makes it impossible to access HNSC.

·         HNSC have a single (unique) URL. So they do not support alternate access mappings and are always considered to be in the Default zone.

·         Most importantly Alternate Access Mappings don’t work with HNSC. You can't use both HTTP and HTTPS together.

·         It can scale to thousands of site collections because they can all exist within a single Web application and still offer vanity naming capability.

·         This helps in hosting multiple tenants on the same farm(multi tenancy)

 

Path-Named

·         All 5 zones are available for Path based sites.

    

     ·         Alternate Access Mappings is very much supported (supports SSL)

   

     ·         User is limited to a single root-level site collection within a Web application

 

Powershell script for creating a HNSC

Well, before executing the below powershell script, we would have to create a web application without Host header.

New-SPSite http://www.testhnsc1.com -OwnerAlias Domain\username -HostHeaderWebApplication <Web-App-URL>

This creates a HNSC with the URL http://www.testhnsc1.com  in the SharePoint 2010 Web Application with the URL <Web-App-URL>


Related Post :  Implementing Host Named Site Collection , Sharepoint Multi Tenancy and Host Named Site Collection 

How to display detailed Sharepoint errors for faster troubleshooting

Browse to the location where the web.config file is located for your web application.Usually C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80  (port number depend on where you have your web application)

Change these values from

<customErrors mode="On" />

And

CallStack="false"

to

<customErrors mode="Off" />

and

CallStack="true"

Save your web.config file. You will get detailed errors from now on.

Configuring Sharepoint BLOB cache settings for a web application

To improve the end user response time a good approach is to configure the BLOB Cache on the SharePoint 2010 Web Front End (WFE) servers. The BLOB cache caches files on the WFEs disk to make it faster for IIS to retrieve the files and return them to the browser. It can also send some HTTP headers telling the browser to cache the file for a certain amount of time. By default, the disk-based BLOB cache is off and must be enabled on the front-end Web server if you want to use it. Use the following procedure to configure disk-based cache settings for a Web application.

1. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

2. In Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, in the Connections pane, click the plus sign (+) next to the server name that contains the Web application, and then click the plus sign next to Sites to view the Web application or applications that have been created.

3. Right-click the name of the Web application for which you want to configure the disk-based cache, and then click Explore. Windows Explorer opens, with the directories for the selected Web application listed.

4. Right-click web.config, and then click Open.

5. If the Windows dialog box appears, select Select a program from a list of installed programs, and then click OK.

6. In the Open With dialog box, click Notepad, and then click OK.

7. In the web.config Notepad file, find the following line: 

<BlobCache location="" path="\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|jpe|jfif|bmp|dib|tif|tiff|ico|png|wdp|hdp|css|js|asf|avi|flv|m4v|mov|mp3|mp4|mpeg|mpg|rm|rmvb|wma|wmv)$" maxSize="10" enabled="false" />

8. In this line, change the location attribute to specify a directory that has enough space to accommodate the cache size.To change the size of the cache, type a new number for maxSize. The size is expressed in gigabytes (GB), and 10 GB is the default. To enable the BLOB cache, change the enabled attribute, from "false" to "true".Save the Notepad file, and then close it.

Important 

- Before you make changes to the web.config file, make a copy of it by using a different name, so that if a mistake is made in the file, you can restore the original file.

- Verify that you have the following administrative credentials: You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to configure the BLOB cache settings.

- When you save a change to the web.config file, the Web application in Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 automatically recycles. This recycling can cause a brief interruption in service to sites contained in that Web application, and users can lose session state.

- It is strongly recommend that you specify a directory that is not on the same drive as where either the server operating system swap files or server log files are stored.

- To add or remove file types from the list of file types to be cached, for the path attribute, modify the regular expression to include or remove the appropriate file extension. If you add file extensions, make sure to separate each file type with a pipe (|), as shown in this line of code. 

- It is recommended that you not set the cache size smaller than 10 GB. When you set the cache size, make sure to specify a number large enough to provide a buffer at least 20 percent bigger than the estimated size of the content that will be stored in the cache.

URL Encoding (The "%20" codes in Sharepoint URLs)

How are characters URL encoded?

URL encoding of a character consists of a "%" symbol, followed by the two-digit hexadecimal representation (case-insensitive) of the ISO-Latin code point for the character.

Example

            Space = decimal code point 32 in the ISO-Latin set.

            32 decimal = 20 in hexadecimal

            The URL encoded representation will be "%20"

Unsafe characters

Why: Some characters present the possibility of being misunderstood within URLs for various reasons. These characters should also always be encoded

Character	Code Points (Hex)	Code Points (Dec)	Why encode?
Space	20	32	Significant sequences of spaces may be lost in some uses (especially multiple spaces)
Quotation marks 'Less Than' symbol ("<") 'Greater Than' symbol (">")	22 3C 3E	34 60 62	These characters are often used to delimit URLs in plain text.
'Pound' character ("#")	23	35	This is used in URLs to indicate where a fragment identifier (bookmarks/anchors in HTML) begins.
Percent character ("%")	25	37	This is used to URL encode/escape other characters, so it should itself also be encoded.
Misc. characters:    Left Curly Brace ("{")    Right Curly Brace ("}")    Vertical Bar/Pipe ("|")    Backslash ("\")    Caret ("^")    Tilde ("~")    Left Square Bracket ("[")    Right Square Bracket ("]")    Grave Accent ("`")	7B 7D 7C 5C 5E 7E 5B 5D 60	123 125 124 92 94 126 91 93 96	Some systems can possibly modify these characters.

Reserved characters

Why: URLs use some characters for special use in defining their syntax. When these characters are not used in their special role inside a URL, they need to be encoded.

Character	Code Points (Hex)	Code Points (Dec)
Dollar ("$")  Ampersand ("&")  Plus ("+")  Comma (",")  Forward slash/Virgule ("/")  Colon (":")  Semi-colon (";")  Equals ("=")  Question mark ("?")  'At' symbol ("@")	24 26 2B 2C 2F 3A 3B 3D 3F 40	36 38 43 44 47 58 59 61 63 64