<blog lang="C#" sdlc="Team Foundation Server"/>

Recently I was tasked to prepare some VMs for some SharePoint Developers and the configuration we decided upon was:

• Windows Server 2008 w/SP2 x64
• SharePoint Server 2007 w/SP2 x64
• SQL Server 2008 w/SP1 x64

After the installation/configuration of SharePoint 2007 the Central Administration site was launched and Internet Explorer displayed a blank page.  This was very odd so one of the first things I did was add the database farm account to the local Administrators group and tried it again.  The Central Administration site displayed correctly.

Since these VMs belonged to a corporate domain I suspected this might be a Group Policy problem so initially we changed the OU that the machines belonged to so it would inherit the policy settings they had for Web Servers, no dice on that one.

Just to make sure it was an environment problem I decided I had better replicate the installation with my own DC just to rule out anything else.  The installation and configuration went perfectly (what I figured).

Next step I decided to download Sysinternals Process Monitor to help track down the source of the problem.  I removed the database farm account from the administrators group, performed an iisreset and then tried the Central Administration site again….blank web page.  So now it was time to get Process Monitor to watch what was happening in IIS.

I configured Process Monitor to display the w3wp.exe events and found this problem

It seemed that the identity used by the Application Pool for the Central Administration was not able to perform any impersonation unless it was a member of the local Administrators group.  I checked the machines local policy on impersonation and found that it was missing a group.

The missing group was IIS_IUSRS which is used by IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008.

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Software includes:

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• Supports Windows Server clustering for any application including SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint

During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated.  This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed.  The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes, 180 days after the SP2 installation will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users but will not affect data, configuration or application code.

You can manually fix the error by re-entering your Product ID number (PID) on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration.  For more information and detailed steps please read this KB article.

For more information please refer to this blog posting from the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group.

Automatically integrate the Microsoft SDL with the SDL Process Template for VSTS

The SDL Process Template is a downloadable template that leverages the technology of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) to automatically integrate the policy, process and tools associated with the Security Development Lifecycle v4.1 into your software development environment.

Download it here.

This Microsoft product is offered typically via OEM partners, but a version for evaluation (TechNet Plus or MSDN), demonstration (MSDN), development (MSDN) or test (MSDN) is now being provided to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers for the first time. This opens the door for a number of interesting scenarios, especially when related to Windows Server Failover Clustering and/or Hyper-V.

Get more details about this from Jose Barreto’s blog posting.