Networking – The Tech Blog of Dan Usher

I’ve been accepted to speak at SharePoint Saturday Baltimore on 25 July 2009. I’ll be giving a talk on the basics of authentication in the context of SharePoint Services platform, with the title of the topic aptly, “Why can’t I access the portal? SharePoint Authentication 101”.

More often than not recently at least I’ve found that it tends to be the surrounding infrastructure that is the true culprit causing my end users to not be able to authenticate. In this talk I’ll be going into the basics of good ole authentication, different authentication methods and some basic troubleshooting tactics.

If you’re on Twitter, setup a search for conversations on the topic of SharePoint Saturday Baltimore with the hashtag – #spsbmore, as well as following @SPSBaltimore for the latest on the event.

For more details on SharePoint Saturday Baltimore, check out http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/baltimore – definitely a strong line up of speakers to include:

Adam Macaulay
Buddy Webber
CA Callahan
Cathy Dew
Dan Lewis
Dux Raymond Sy
Eric Harlan
Errin O’Connor
Gary Vaughan
Geoff Varosky
Joel Oleson
Kenneth Lo
Linc Williams
Martin Boggess
Michael Noel
Mike Watson
Paul Schaeflein
Russ Basiura
Sandeep Nahta
Shadeed Eleazer
Steve Andrews
Susan Lennon

Troubleshooting Tip of the Day… Network Configuration – Wrong Gateway

For those of you that have ever setup a server with two NICs, you probably know that it’s usually best to either a) team the NICs to have greater performance, or b) have them on completely separate LANs and only have one that is registered in DNS with the domain name that you are hosting out your site through.A few weeks ago, while working on a dev lab MOSS Server in a medium farm configuration I ran into a problem where the server in question was configured with the same gateway on both NICs, but the NICs were in completely separate subnets, thereby causing some traffic to drop as the NIC attempting to pass traffic to a gateway which was not situated on the subnet for which the NIC was configured for. Needless to say after scratching my head for a while and wondering why 500 error messages were coming up sporadically and after checking the supporting AD infrastructure it was back to the basics of checking network connections. Fortunately after about five minutes of reviewing adapter configurations the issue was remedied by removing the DNS registration of the secondary NIC (used for backups and remote desktop administration) in addition to removing the gateway so that all traffic requests would be responding through the primary NIC.

Level of difficulty in resolving the issue – pretty low, however definitely recommend some basic networking courses to all the aspiring SharePoint Infrastructure Engineers out there so that they’re able to troubleshoot their surrounding network for issues which may affect their system.