Provisioning Shared Services is MOSS / SPS taking forever (my dumb mistake)

russch — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:23:00 GMT

I just learned a hard, cruel lesson today. I’ve been trying to configure Shared Services on a MOSS machine, and I found that once I started the process, it would run for 60+ minutes without completing.

Checking in the Shared Services window of Central Administration, I would see a “Provisioning in progress” message, but it, never, ever completed. CPU and disk util were flat and it was pretty apparent nothing was going on. I bounced the box several times to try altering the accounts I was using during the configuration process, and had no success.

Well, one of my buddies led me astray in an effort to help out. He told me to stop the Windows SharePoint Services Timer because it tends to kick off expensive jobs (indexing), etc. So, being the resource miser I am, I turned it off.

Turns out, this service KICKS OFF most of the provisioning work! (I’m such a moron). After ripping up my Captain Riker pajamas up in frustration, I realized that this was one of the few “optimizations” I had on this box that I hadn’t put on others…When I turned the service back on, CPU jumped, disks starting jamming, and about 3 minutes later I was done.

So, if you don’t want to mess up your favorite Star Trek ‘jammies, don’t turn this service off until AFTER you have fully configured your machine!

Data Refresh in Excel Services fails with "SSO has failed with the following error code -2140995579, exception: Error in the application"

russch — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:37:00 GMT

I've been playing quite a bit with Excel Services the last few weeks, and ran into a problem around refreshing data in a worksheet stored in Excel Services when I used Single Sign On (SSO) in the ODC.

I also noticed that each time my report failed to refresh data, the error in the subject of this post got dumped into the event log.

I asked for help, then did some digging. Turns out this error is one of those "by design" (or, "by bad design") issues. Some of you might call it a bug :)

In essence, if the account you use for the Shared Services Provider (as in "SharedServices1") is different than your Farm and/or SSO Account identities, you'll get this error. They must all be the same, even though I didn't see this documented anywhere (and to be fair, I haven't spent tons of time looking).

Thanks to Chris Nicholas for his help on this problem!

Russell Christopher's Semi-Useful BI Musings : Excel Services

Provisioning Shared Services is MOSS / SPS taking forever (my dumb mistake)

Data Refresh in Excel Services fails with "SSO has failed with the following error code -2140995579, exception: Error in the application"