Recycle bin retention period: maximum days

I had the 70-668 PRO SHAREPOINT 2010 exam today and a doubt pop-up in my mind when reading a question.

It was related to how long a document could stay in the recycle bin. And I didn´t know the answer. When I tried to find some answer I couldn´t find it at Microsoft technet or at least I couldn´t place it, all what I found is:

·  You can specify a time after which items in the Recycle Bins are deleted, or you can specify that these items should never be deleted. By default, items are deleted after 30 days.

·  You can specify a percentage of live site quota for second-stage deleted items. The default setting is 50 percent. You can also turn off second-stage Recycle Bins. If you select Off, site collection administrators cannot recover items deleted from end-user Recycle Bins.The second-stage Recycle Bin quota percentage must be a value from 1 through 500.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287766%28v=office.14%29.aspx

So I tried to modified the default value (30) for a bigger one in "delete items in the Recycle Bin" After : 9999999999 and I got a message "Recycle bin retention period must be between 1 and 10000 days"

More than 27 years for retention.. nice number.

Moreover you might choose "never" also, which means that all deleted items will remain in the recycle bin until you will remove from there manually. This option may require extra management to avoid storage issues ...

Excel Services crashes when creating

I needed to create the excel Services, initially an easy and fast task to execute throught CA. But not so easy ended.

PROCEDURE

1. Creating the service:

Application management > Manage service applications > New > excel Service application

1. Starting the service on the app server you choose

Manage servers in this farm> server > excel calculation services: start

1. Associating the web application with the service: That´s the point that in fact fails behind the scenes, on the SQL part.

Application management >> configure service application associations

ERRORS ..

In fact I got different errors in 2 farms. The ULS logs show:

Farm A: there was an error in communicating with excel Calculation Services  http:// …. Exception: the remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidded

 FARM B:There was an error in communicating with Excel Calculation Services http://AppServer:32843/ceaafed8560b789456b1c0b95625c889a/ExcelService*.asmx exception: The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden. [Session:  User: DOMAIN\poolaccount].

In the application Log you might find:

Unexpected error when trying to access service settings in the configuration database. Make sure the proxy for this service application is a member of the default proxy group for the active web application. Error = ExcelServerWebServiceApplication.Local: Could not get the web application associated with this context. This indicates that the Excel Server service is not properly registered or provisioned..
 
SOLUTION

After some research I found out that Microsoft already published the issue/workaround. It seems that when you create the service after the installation of the farm the privilege that the service account needs to access to the content database of the web application is missing. You need to do it by command line. The nice thing is that it´s working properly:

•  $w = Get-SPWebApplication -Identity http://portal

•  $w.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity("domain\serviceaccount")

•  $excel = Get-SPExcelServiceApplication

•  $excel.Provision()

 

Issue : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981293

Security vulnerability :: SharePoint 2010 SP1_March, 12

MS13-024: Vulnerabilities in SharePoint could allow elevation of privilege: March 12, 2013

More info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-024#section6

SharePoint XSS Vulnerability - CVE-2013-0083
An elevation of privilege exists in Microsoft SharePoint Server. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could potentially issue SharePoint commands in the context of an administrative user on the site.

To view this vulnerability as a standard entry in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures list, see CVE-2013-0083.

Remove-SPContentdatabase VS deleting the BBDD using Central Administration interface

There´re some differences when handling sharepoint tasks using the Central Administration interface and the cmdlet. This fact is more obvious within time and issues. Here one of them ....

Which is the difference between deleting a content database from cmdlet and for Central Administration? … Yes, there is a difference, and it´s a big one!

• Central Administration: in fact you dismount the database from the site, It will not appear related to any site but it is not being removed from the SQL server itself, you always have the option of attached it again

• Cmdlet remove-spcontentdatabase. When you run this command (ie.  remove-spcontentdatabase Wss_Content_LibraryHome) 2 questions will pop up:

Are you sure you want to perform this action?

Removing "Wss_Content_LibraryHome" will permanately delete the SQL database, permananetly deleting all content stores within it.