STSADM

This is something that’s been bugging me for a long time – when you run the out of the box execadmsvcjobs command on a server it only ensures that pending jobs on that one server are executed – when it completes it doesn’t mean that jobs on other servers in the farm have completed.

I’d been meaning to post this for quite some time but just haven’t gotten around to it – as paranoid administrators we often find the need to change our service account passwords and doing so with a product like SharePoint can be a rather significant effort if you consider all the various accounts that may be used in a least privileges model.

This past week I presented at the local Colorado Springs SharePoint User Group meeting on using and customizing STSADM. The talk was really less about STSADM and more about SharePoint administration tips, tricks, and best practices – but we did create a new STSADM command from scratch during the meeting.

A little over a year ago I created one of my first STSADM commands, gl-setpictureurlnewpath, which I developed in order to enable me to set the picture URL property for user profile objects to a new path as the result of the upgrade which resulted in the images going to a new library.

This post wraps up my event receiver posts. I just finished documenting the gl-addeventreceiver and gl-deleteeventreceiver commands and this final command would be gl-enumeventreceivers. This command is the simplest of the three as it’s just looping through all the event receivers belonging to the specified target and dumping the results out as XML.

I had some time so I decided to add the counterparts to the gl-addeventreceiver command that I just published. I created two new commands, gl-deleteeventreceiver and gl-enumeventreceivers. This post will cover the delete command and I’ll go over the enum command in my next post.

A few months ago I created a CodePlex project that allows you to configure a library to allow the storing of web part page history. The project at its core used three item event receivers to listen to certain key events and either backup the page or restore the page based on the event.

I’m working on a project which is going to require the creation of about a hundred publishing pages which were going to have to be created by hand. I really didn’t want to have to sit there going through the UI to create all those pages so I threw together a new STSADM command that I could use via a script to create the pages: gl-createpublishingpage.

I can’t really take much credit for this command – fellow MVP Todd Klindt had a custom console application that he’d created to do the same thing but it was lacking some functionality and was not created as an stsadm extension.

This is one that I’ve been wanting to address for a while and I finally decided to sit down and just do it. If you’ve had your environment in place long enough to have to change the passwords you know that you can change most of the passwords using the out of the box STSADM commands – many refer to this support article from Microsoft on how to do this: http://support.