I am mighty!
From time to time I plan to post about my dealings with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This is the first such post.
I'll try to keep them from being too tech heavy, so even if you've never touched SharePoint before, you might enjoy reading about my struggles with it.
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Ok, so, a couple months ago I set up a WSS 3.0 SharePoint site for a project. They wanted a quick-and-dirty setup within 2 days, for light use with the project, just to share a couple files back and forth easily. No time to do a full MOSS rollout, so I set up a virtual server with the free WSS 3.0 using the free SQL Server Express.
My coworker Dave warned me that this quick-and-dirty implementation wouldn't stay just "light use," but rather would become a crutch that the project would use extensively, much more than they intended when they asked me to set it up.
Needless to say, Dave was absolutely right. As demonstrated below:
So, the scenario goes like this. A user wanted to upload a 140MB file to the site. This is a normal occurrance, the user has the latest build of a piece of software and needs to send it to other team members to test it out. Others have uploaded similar files before without a problem. But today, this user couldn't.
So I grabbed my System Administrator cap, and got to work.
I checked his permissions. He had the wrong access level. Fixed that.
But he still couldn't upload the file. After going through the upload screen, it said the file uploaded properly. Only, when looking at the list of files in the directory, it simply wasn't there. Vanished! *POOF*
The file was a .tar.gz file. So, I checked whether it was a blocked filetype. That checked out ok, there was no restriction on it.
I checked his user file quota: No Quota. So that's fine.
I checked the max size a file can be in this sharepoint site: bumped it from 200 MB to 400 MB. Still no luck.
Ok, next, I thoguht the filename was too long (it was about 40 characters.
So I changed the name to foo.tar.gz, and uploaded it. Again, no luck.
So, I uploaded a 50MB file... and... it worked! Strange
So I did some investigating, and found out pretty quickly that SQL Express has a 4GB total data file size limit.
Ok. 4GB, there's no way the site's users could have used 4GB of data file space... could there be?
So I totaled the amount of data, it was under 3GB.
So... checked the recycle bin. It had a few things, soI emptied it, tried uploading the file again. No luck...
...Until I found out that sharepoint has a SECONDARY Recycle Bin
...which had well over a GB of stuff in it!
Clearing the secondary bin worked, and the 140MB file now uploads properly.
One of the most frustrating things about SharePoint is that when a problem occurs, there are dozens of potential causes for the problem, and it's often a long chain of trial and error to diagnose and fix the issue.
But you know what, when you DO get it to work, you feel All-Powerful!
I am Mighty!