All posts by wichita.sao

My own worst enemy

Personal

I’m sitting here at a major crossroad in my life I never expected to be at left wondering, how did I get here? I feel like I’ve worked so hard to have a decent career, have a good income, provide for my family, and generally not do evil. How is it that I’ve ended up separated for a year, searching for a divorce mediator, and questioning so many aspects of my life?

I think the answer lies in questioning why have I done everything I’ve done up until now? Why did I work so hard to have a decent career? Why was income important to me? Why did I work so hard to be a family man when I’m realizing there are aspects of it I was just not in lockstep with my partner for?

Fundamentally, much of it was the pressures I was feeling from outside of myself. I am the child of an immigrant family. A family uprooted and thrust into a society they knew very little about, refugees from a civil upheaval in their home country. Escaping a situation where one could be killed simply for being well educated, or even just wearing glasses for that matter. I can only imagine that at the forefront of adjusting to a new country with two young children that their main concern was that everyone fit in, didn’t stand out, didn’t make waves.

As such those values of “fitting in” were ingrained in me from the start and all throughout my life. But what is fitting in? When I was split between my life outside of the house, just trying to keep lockstep with my peers as an American and my home life, expected to fulfill familial duties and expectations I was never even exposed to. What is fitting in, when you’re told not to stand out, but in order to succeed in corporate America, you have to stand out from your peers as having something they don’t?

In today’s context, how do I promote and live by an ethos of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice when I come from a background of fitting in and not standing out? I don’t feel it’s a scenario unique to myself, but likely shared with anyone that feels like an “other” to varying degrees. And just as everyone is unique, so too is their approach to handling their situation.

For me, up until this point in my life, I’ve chosen the path of least resistance. I have tried to fit in with what I perceive as social norms. Get good grades, get a decent job, have a wife and kids, buy a house. I’ve done all of those things and I’ve been lucky to have had that opportunity. But again as I sit here going through a divorce, no longer in that house I worked so hard for, not being a part of my children’s lives in the way I always saw myself as being, and I can only blame myself.

I realized that I’ve failed at all of those because I’ve never allowed myself to just be myself. I’ve invested so much into trying to check all the boxes I never asked, are those the boxes I really wanted to check? How do I invest myself in anything when I don’t even know what it is I have to invest?

I have been extremely privileged to have had the opportunities to achieve what I have. I have no regrets that I met, married, and still continue to have an extremely intelligent, diligent, and honest best friend. No regrets that I have two extremely intelligent, happy, and charismatic children. The regret I do have is that I have not been able to give them 100% of myself, 100% of what they deserve.

So, now at this crossroad of a major regret, I’m trying to flip the script. I am no longer concerning myself with what is normal, what is expected, what is fitting in. I’m taking the time to truly figure out what will make me happy and who am I as a person. To take the harder path because I already know that I may be met with resistance and criticism, possibly from some of my own family. But, there are a handful of people that I want to always be a part of my life and to be a part of theirs. The very least I can give them at this point is 100% honesty, and that starts with figuring out and being honest with myself.

SharePoint 2013 – Office + Claims

Archive, SharePoint

With newer releases of IE and Office, we’re seeing more and more of our SharePoint sites using claims authentication present users with login prompts directly in Office applications. As a security best practice, we avoid leaving persistent cookies around on end user devices. The only issue with this is that when a user attempts to click on a link to an office document, Office will often try to directly open up the file directly from the SharePoint site as opposed to local cached or downloaded copy. When it does so, it will not be able to “share” the authentication session and there will a fresh login prompt. Depending on the level of customization of your SharePoint site, and the inner workings of your trusted identity provider; your user may never get to the document. In any case there are a lot of extra clicks and a poor user experience.

So, how do we get back to the old ways where a user is prompted with the download dialog, Open/Save/Cancel.

Block all of the “enhancements” that have been added to IIS to let IE and Office “discover” that you’re on a SharePoint site.

In IE9 and IE10, IE will see that the mimetype is an office document, launch said office prodcut, and send along the document URL.  At this point Office says, well, lets check this URL to see if it really is SharePoint.  Office will execute direct http requests with the HTTP Verbs Options and Propfind which (assuming you login) SharePoint responds well to and says, yeah sure I’m a SharePoint site.  Office then gives the user options for checking in and out directly from the Office client

Fix: Block the HTTP verbs Options and Propfind HTTP Verbs

IE11 makes use of a newer response header called X-MS-InvokeApp.  This tells IE hey, this is an Office Document, hosted on SharePoint, and you should invoke whatever office application you have.  If it happens to the full MS Office suite, lets go ahead and try to open in integrated mode.  On top of that, just to be sure Office will also execute a HEAD http request and check the response headers itself.

Fix: Remove/rename the X-MS-InvokeApp response header in IIS and also block the HEAD tag. (in addition to the IE9/IE10 fixes)

My frustrations with the Distributed Cache

Archive, SharePoint

The distributed cache was a great idea introduced with SharePoint 2013.  It truly allows for a load balanced, highly available SharePoint farm where a user no longer needs to retain server affinity.  If I logged in on web front end 1 somehow get routed to web front end 2, no issues, lets just pull your login tokens, viewstate, and news feeds from this new cache shared across all the servers.

That said, so far maintaining it in a large enterprise environment has been a challenge. I have the opportunity(curse) of working in an environment of hundreds of SharePoint servers on premises. Our 2013 footprint is quickly growing; quickly enough that we can’t keep on top of say, manually, gracefully shutting down our distributed cache services every time an OS patch window rolls around.

Oh and what about those times that Windows just doesn’t want to play nice and a server blue screens, or worse just hangs. At this point we’re left with a server with an empty cache, which every other server in the farm thinks should have all of our logon tokens!

SP: Access Denied!!!
Browser: but I have a valid FedAuth cookie still!
SP: Yeah well I have no idea what happened to your claims so I’m not sharing
Browser: but…FedAuth
SP: I’m just trying to be nice, but I just don’t think this site has been shared with you.

So where do we go from here. The ideal situation is that before a cache server is restarted, the service is gracefully stopped, then removed.

Stop-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance -Graceful
Remove-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance
*thank the MS Gods for autocomplete…

And after reboot, re-added.

Add-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance

But, can we fire that automatically for all reboot situations? Well, no, not easily.

1) Any shutdown tasks will not save you in the case of a blue screen, hardware failure, or a guy in the data center tripping over the power cord.   The other servers in the farm will not know to rebuild the cache, it’ll just keep sending the requests to the bads server.

2) There is no ideal way to run the Powershell on start up, as a farm account, and please don’t tell me your farm account is Local Service or Network Service on a multi-server farm.  The closes you can come is a start up script assigned to the local policy that calls a secondary script that has hardcoded credentials to impersonate a farm admin account.

What we’re doing:

1) record the last time each server had its distributed cache gracefully started.  SPServer.Properties is a good place for that

2) Every 30 minutes or so, check this against the server’s last boot time (WMI)

3) If the last reboot is more recent than the last graceful dist cache start up, tell the farm to rebuild that server’s cache.

Sprinkle in some (lots of) error handling and call it a day.

Things that would compel me to buy a smartwatch

Archive, Personal

1) self contained data connectivity that doesn’t cost me more than my kids college fund each month. You would think that at one point wireless bandwidth would be great enough that networks would no longer need to roll out new towers/technology and it would all become just paying for wear and tear of the network. It would become a utility and would just need maintenance and upkeep.

2) bioelectric charging – If I’m wearing it all day, why can’t it feed off my ridiculous metabolism. I’ll admit I have no idea if the human body could generate enough energy to power a device regardless of chip advances but wouldn’t it be awesome to never have to charge the thing.

3) Control for everything – the Internet of things is already in place and my watch is my easy button.

That said, I’d probably end up buying one much sooner than any of these are feasible, but sometimes it’s nice to think of the end game and not just the next step.

SharePoint 2013 App Domain dedicated Port binding vs dedicated IP binding

Archive, SharePoint, ,

I’ve recently been researching into what exactly is needed for implementing the App Model in SharePoint 2013.  Notably the environment into which we would be deploying SharePoint 2013 doesn’t support creating multiple IPs on a single box, so I had to get creative with the IIS bindings and instead use port separation.

The issue with this is that this isn’t a documented use case by Microsoft, so time to dig under the covers.

The app domains that you configure for a farm are essentially root domains for automatically generated hostname based site collections (HNSC).  You give SharePoint an app domain of myspapps.com and SharePoint dynamically generates HNSCs with each app “install”.

This is why the Site Subscription service (which powers HNSCs) is required to enable apps.  So we set up a wildcard DNS entry, point it at some sort of reverse proxy or load balancer, and direct it at our servers on a custom nonstandard http/https port.

It would be great if this worked out of the box, but for any redirect URLs that get sent back to the browser client, we see that the custom port number is sent back.  If you don’t have your proxy or load balancer configured to take this into account, you end up with 404s.  This is most evident in the out of the box defaultcss.ashx.  Your app will load but the out of the box stylesheets will fail.

In normal site collections/web applications this is not an issue as we can set up alternate access mappings.  Public = reverse proxy URL, internal = URL on custom port, or in the case of an HNSC, the commandlet you use to create the site collection also allows you to specify the port.

Microsoft already recognized a limitation in that apps could not support multiple auth zones, or HNSCs and provided a solution in the March PU They added a few new commandlets for generating per web-application app domains with support for multiple zones as well.  The new commandlets take advantage of more of the HNSC functionality and as a side effect it now allows for specifying a port for an app domain mapping.  While the documentation covers configuration at a per zone/HNSC app domain, it does go far enough to state that a single app domain can be shared so long as the authentication scheme and app pools match.

This gives us the ability to have the same exact functionality with the ability for SharePoint to properly resolve and regenerate URLs with the proper public URL format regardless of the IIS binding. Follow the link at the source for instructions on how to leverage the new commandlets if you’re running into challenges enabling Apps with a separate listener URL and public URL. You’ll want to pass the app domain and port for the public URL along to the commandlet and make sure your reverse proxy/load balancer passes on the Host: header to match.

Commandlet: New-SPWebApplicationAppDomain
Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn144963.aspx

*Note, the new commandlets are not yet in the commandlet reference since those haven’t been published since July 2012.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee890108.aspx