Enabling incoming email on SharePoint 2013

I am running SharePoint 2013 RTM on one of my demo servers and want to enable incoming email. The configuration is exactly the same as in SharePoint 2010:
Setup your SMTP server to receive email
Set "Enable sites on this server to receive e-mail" to Yes
Verify firewall settings to allow connections to port 25

However, after checking all this, my incoming email was still not making it into my lists. I can see the incoming email message sitting in the C:\inetpub\mailroot\Drop folder and it is not being processed.

By chance, I decided to set "Enable sites on this server to receive e-mail" to No, save and then back to Yes. Then miraculously, the incoming email is now being processed. I have now seen this exact behaviour several times with my SharePoint 2013 instances.

SharePoint 2013 About Me page timing out

For some reason, all of a sudden, I am no longer able to access my "About Me" page (/my/Person.aspx) on one of my SharePoint 2013 demo servers. I can access the "About Me" page for everyone else and everyone else can also access their "About Me" page, but no one can access mine. It seems to spin for a long time and then time out. The only thing in ULS is an aborted thread exception.

Finally, I tried accessing the edit page of my "About Me" using /my/_layouts/15/EditProfile.aspx, hit save without even changing anything and magically, I can see my "About Me" page again.

Very bizarre.

Crawling root web of a site collection

I was recently trying to troubleshoot a search problem with my application. It turned out that there was a list at the root web of a site collection that was not being indexed by search.

$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "FAST Search Query Service Application"}

$logViewer = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.LogViewer($ssa)

$urlProperty = [Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CrawlLogFilterProperty]::Url

$stringOperator = [Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.StringFilterOperator]::Contains

$crawlLogFilters = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CrawlLogFilters

$searchUrl = 'my URL'

$crawlLogFilters.AddFilter($urlProperty, $stringOperator, $searchUrl)

$i=0

$urls = $logViewer.GetCurrentCrawlLogData($crawlLogFilters, ([ref] $i))

$urls

Then I checked with a colleague and it turns out that all I needed to check was Site Actions->Site Settings->Search and offline availability. The "Allow this site to appear in search results" was set to No. 

SharePoint connection to SQL Server

This is a big <facepalm> since it should have been pretty obvious.

I was trying to install a new SharePoint 2013 farm connecting to a brand new SQL Server 2008 R2. In the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard, it asks for the SQL connection and kept rejecting my credentials. Checking on the SQL server side, I could not see any connection attempts. I used the following to test with Powershell

$CommandText = "SELECT @@VERSION"
$SqlCommand=New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand($CommandText)
$ConnectionString='Data Source=SQL1;Initial Catalog=master;Integrated Security=SSPI'
$SqlCommand.Connection=New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection($ConnectionString)
$SqlAdapter=New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataAdapter($SqlCommand)
$DataSet=New-Object System.Data.DataSet
$SqlAdapter.Fill($DataSet)

I kept getting all sorts of errors. It turns out the Windows Firewall on my SQL server was not allowing port 1433. Argh - wasted a couple of hours tracking this one down.

Accessing Windows Azure blob storage

I have some files transferred to a container in my storage account. Now on a new VM, I need to access these files, but do not have CloudXplorer since .NET has not yet been installed. So I turned to the StorageClient module and Powershell.

Import-Module Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll
$storageAccountName = 'my storage account'
$accessKey = 'my access key'
$storageCredentials = New-Object Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey($storageAccountName, $accessKey)
$storageAccountEndpoint = "http://$storageAccountName.blob.core.windows.net/"
$blobClient = New-Object Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.CloudBlobClient($storageAccountEndpoint, $storageCredentials)
$filename = "my file"
$blob = $blobClient.GetBlobReference($filename)
$localFilename = "local filename"
$blob.DownloadToFile($localFilename)

References:
CloudBlob.DownloadToFile
Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient


Edit 2013-04-05
This is based on the 1.0 Storage Client. Updated script can be found in an updated post on Windows Azure Storage through Powershell

User Profile Synchronization not synchronizing email address

I found this on my new SP 2013 installation. After a user profile synchronization, my email addresses were not coming over from AD. Doing some poking around, I found that the user profile property was not mapped to the correct attribute.
To correct:

1. Go to Central Administration->Manage Service Applications.
2. Go to your User Profile Service Application
3. Go to Manage User Properties
4. Scroll down to Work email (under the Contact Information Section)
5. Edit Work email
6. Remove the existing Property Mapping for Synchronization mappings. They were inexplicably set to proxyAddresses (aCSPolicyName).
7. Add new mapping to the mail attribute
8. Start a Profile Sync
9. Save and OK

It looks like just a simple profile sync would not work. You actually have to update the email addresses of each user and then do a sync. Argh!

UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException System.TimeoutException

I have a service the frequently accesses the User Profile Service Application. Intermittently, I would get the following:

Error generating SyndicationItem for ActivityEvent 0B275DAC41FD141CB2382AAE5987540D  Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException: System.TimeoutException    
 at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileDBCacheServiceClient.GetUserData(UserSearchCriteria searchCriteria)    
 at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileCache.GetUserData(UserProfileManager objManager, Nullable`1 recordId, Guid gAcct, String strAcct, Byte[] bSid, String strEmail, Boolean doNotResolveToMasterAccount)    
 at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfile.RetrieveUser(String strAcct, Guid gAcct, Byte[] bSid, Nullable`1 recordId, Boolean doNotResolveToMasterAccount, Boolean loadFullProfile)    
 at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfile..ctor(UserProfileManager objManager, Int64 recordId)    
 at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager.GetUserProfile(Int64 recordId)

I tried the following to confirm:

$app = Get-SPWebApplication
$site = Get-SPSite $app.Url
$context = Get-SPServiceContext $site
$upm = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($context)
$upm.UserExists('someuser')

... and it just hangs.

Since this is a demo machine, there could be many factors:

1. Not enough resources

2. Application pool crash

3. Database not responding

4. General UPA flakiness

5. All of the above (and possibly pointing to #1 as the root cause).

I tried stop/start on the UPS and UPSS, then an iisreset. This didn't fix the problem. However, a reboot did.

Further looking at the event logs, I do see the following events from MsiInstaller that might be suspicious:

Detection of product '{90140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}', feature 'PeopleILM', component '{1C12B6E6-898C-4D58-9774-AAAFBDFE273C}' failed.  The resource 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Service\Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Service.exe' does not exist.
Detection of product '{90140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}', feature 'PeopleILM' failed during request for component '{9AE4D8E0-D3F6-47A8-8FAE-38496FE32FF5}'
Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x80070005
Detection of product '{90140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}', feature 'PeopleILM', component '{1C12B6E6-898C-4D58-9774-AAAFBDFE273C}' failed.  The resource 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Service\Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Service.exe' does not exist.
Detection of product '{90140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}', feature 'PeopleILM' failed during request for component '{1681AE41-ADA8-4B70-BC11-98A5A4EDD046}'
Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x80070005

... followed by one from FIMSynchronizationService:

The management agent "MOSS-3692cc7e-f3bf-4090-ae09-a552d3c61b7e" completed run profile "MOSS_DELTAIMPORT_4adf3894-708b-4ae2-ab9f-60438a49cae1" with a delta import or delta synchronization step type. The rules configuration has changed since the last full import or full synchronization.
 
User Action
To ensure the updated rules are applied to all objects, a run with step type of full import and full synchronization should be completed.

It was patch Tuesday a couple of days ago, perhaps that had a factor since I have auto updates enabled (which curiously did not install).