I’m in the same job I’ve been in for several years.  Recently I’ve decided I need to boost my resume a bit.  I started studying for some Microsoft certifications.  My goal is to complete as many as I can before my family forgets who I am.  My 8-5 time is pretty full with work so that only leaves evenings and weekends for studying.  Unfortunately that’s also the only time I get to see my family.  Last week, I passed 70-667, Configuring Microsoft SharePoint 2010.  I didn’t have any problem passing but it was actually a bit more difficult than I expected.  I studied the Sybex and MS Press books as well as experimented in areas of SharePoint I don’t deal with on a daily basis.  If you have experience in SharePoint and you spend some time studying those books, I don’t suspect you would have a problem passing.

This was the first test I had taken in years.  I took a few MS tests years ago to get certified in Windows 2000 Server.  Before that, I got my A+.  As you can tell, it’s been a while.  I have to admit, I was pretty stressed.  Thankfully my job paid for the test and I get free access to the books through a work contract with Books 24×7.  Not having to worry about the costs helped but I was still excessively stressed.  Hopefully now that I’ve completed one, I won’t be so worked up about the next ones.

Speaking of next ones, I’m starting on 70-640 now.  Originally I planned on doing the next SharePoint PRO exam 70-668, but decided to hold off a little bit.  SharePoint is just one part of my job and I feel like I can push through the Server Administrator and Enterprise Administrator MCITP exams fairly quickly.  After that, I’ll probably pick up the SharePoint one.  We’ll see.  Having the time to devote to studying is still very much a problem.  It is a high priority for me though and I’ve put most other things outside of work on hold until I get through this.  We’ll have to wait and see if I can keep it up or if life gets in the way.

I got some inquiries about my home office after I posted about it.  I don’t really have much of an update.  This home office build is one of the things that I had to put on hold.  I have a lot of the parts cut out and waiting to be assembled but it is a long ways from being done.  Maybe after I get a few more tests completed, I’ll reward myself with a weekend in the shop.  Again, we’ll have to wait and see.

Till next time…

42

My first thought was to double check permissions.  Their active directory admin group is listed as an administrator and they are still members of the group.  I went ahead and added them under Permissions as well.  No help.  Other search administrative tasks seem fine so I believe permissions are correct.  The Access denied error had a correlation ID so I checked out the trace logs.  This is what I found:

SharePoint Foundation        Topology     8dyu High The SPPersistedObject, SearchService Name=OSearch14, could not be updated because the current user is not a Farm Administrator.

Is that true?  Can you not update Crawler impact rules without being a farm administrator?  Making the search team farm admins is way beyond the permissions they should need in order to manage search.  I need a solution that doesn’t require giving them the keys to the kingdom!

If you have any ideas, please post in the comments below or hit me up on twitter.  I’ll be sure to update this post if I’m able to find a solution.

All of that takes up half of my basement.  The other half is a kind of junk room.  It has a freezer, home gym, laundry room, bookcases, etc.  The idea is to take one small corner of it and make it my home office.  Then organize the rest so it can also be a place to store the kid’s toys.  Side note, our kid’s current toy room is our living room and bedroom.  That needs to change.

The area for my home office is pretty small.  Unfortunately it can’t get any bigger since it is boxed in by the doors to the laundry room and the exit doors.  The space is about 96” x 86”.  I need to fit a large desk area, cabinets, and a couple bookshelves.  That is a lot but I think I can make it fit.

This is it minus doors and a few small miscellaneous details.  There are two bookshelves on one wall and my desk on the other two.  One desk has a keyboard tray and the other is lowered for a laptop or for writing.  The large black box on the one desk is my multi-function laser printer.  A small color ink jet goes above it on that shelf.  Below the printer is a file cabinet.  To the left of the keyboard tray is my main computer.  Above it will be a pull out shelf with my flatbed scanner.  To the right of the keyboard tray is my mini-rack.  I’ll have about 15U for my two home servers, switch, UPS, etc.

This is my favorite detail. (Click to enlarge)  The back of the desk has a couple doors to allow you to get to the computers.  You can easily get to the back of my PC to mess with cables.  This is also actually the front of the server rack.  Instead of trying to mount the servers from under the desk, I can simply slide them in from here.  There will be doors but I’ll add plenty of ventilation.  This should cut down on noise and keep them nice and hidden.

Lastly the framing behind the desk is hollow or it has holes between the hidden supports.  This will allow me to have great cable management.  Everything will be tucked out of the way.  I’m currently looking for a nice but cheap three monitor bracket.  For now, I’ll put my monitors on the desk but I would like to eventually mount them to give myself a bit more room.  There are two 20” 4:3 monitors with a 24” widescreen in the middle.

I’ve attached the sketchup if you would like to take a closer look but please keep in mind that it is still a work in progress.  I have a lot of demolition to do before I can get started and some of my measurements may need to change.

What do you think my desk is missing?  Are there any cool geeky things you think it needs?  Somewhere there will be a popup power/USB hub but there is room for more geeky stuff.  If you were building a home office from scratch, what would be on your wishlist?

Everything wood was made by hand.  That includes the cabinets, doors, shelves, frame, everything.  My lovely wife helped install the tile.  My only real complaint is the wood I chose.  It is all oak.  I went with that since it is cheap and easy to find locally.  If I could do it over, I would have chosen something more interesting.  Walnut or a dark mahogany would have been my first choice but it is expensive and hard to come by around here.

I’ll try to post about my next project within the next few days.  I’m building a home office.

*I still have a couple things I want to do but they will have to wait for me to finish a couple other projects first.  I want to add locking glass doors to the upper center cabinet as well as in front of the wine cabinet.  My kids are young but I would like the option to lock away the liquor as they get older.

Check’em out and if anyone would like a larger version of any pics, send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this post and I’ll get it to you.

THE GALLERY

This has been a pretty interesting year.  When I switched over to this blog for all of my technical posts, I figured I would pretty much lose all my readers.  I mean if my mom doesn’t need to wade through the tech posts to find the one somewhat interesting to her, that will significantly reduce my numbers. But instead of that happening, this has been one of the better years as far as readership goes.  I’m not quite sure what has caused it.  Was it the more focused posts or the content?  Was it due to my larger involvement in the tech community?  My guess is it is because I’ve taken a more active roll in social networking when it comes to tech.  Hopefully 2010 is an even better year.

Speaking of 2010, I think I may make a few minor changes to this blog.  I’ll still have the tech posts but I may toss in a few non-IT related ones.  I’m one of those guys with a lot of hobbies and I enjoy sharing them with people.  Because of that, you may end up seeing more posts related to them.  I’m into amature photography.  Also there are few things I love more than taking some pieces of wood and turning them into something beautiful and/or useful.  Once the weather gets warmer, I’ll get out to the shop more and possibly post about it on here a little.  We’ll see. Don’t worry about me getting too broad with my posts.  I’ll keep the more personal posts and political commentary elsewhere. 

Thank you all for reading and I’ll see you next year!

If you are still experiencing the problem, grab the December 2009 cumulative update and patch.

When you try to perform a search in a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site, the “This List: Name of list, doclib etc.” scope for a list is missing. This issue occurs because https:// is used to visit the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site.

That looks an awful lot like what we were experiencing.  If you are still seeing this issue, try installing the latest updates and let us know if it fixes it.

Go HERE to get the updates.

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics | Where {$_.ItemsInFolder -gt 5000} | Sort-Object -Property ItemsInFolder -Descending | fl Identity, ItemsInFolder

That searches the entire Org. You will want to specify specific servers or stores.

This will be incredibly helpful to help hunt down some performance issues you may be experiencing on some servers. Also it can allow you to be proactive in improving the experience for a user. I can’t imagine a user with 30,000 items in his mailbox is saying good things about your service. For the record, at this moment, I have 3 items in my inbox. It may be a record. I don’t think I’ve had it this low since the day I got it. It is such a great feeling.

http://www.hugheserblog.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=32

A few of my favorites are in the previous post:

http://www.hugheserblog.com/2009/10/24/huey-lewis-the-news-the-microsoft-sharepoint-conference-2009/

If you would like a high quality version of any of these pics, let me know and I can send them your way.

Enjoy!