When Software Attacks!

Adding DHCP Option 119 (Domain Search List) to Windows Server 2008 R2

If you’ve seen my recent blog post on making Android work in Hyper-V you will have seen my problems around DNS resolution when in the office. That turned out to be down to the DHCP options being handed back by our Server 2008 R2 box. Or rather, it was what wasn’t being handed back to the client that was the problem. Linux (and Apple OSX, as it turns out) both want a response to option 119, which defines the domain suffix search order.

Streaming video to XBOX 360 from Windows Home Server 2011

This one threw me for a while and I could find nothing specific on the web. I wanted to use my Xbox 360 to watch video streamed from my Windows Home Server. Streaming is switched on by default, I hear you say. Why, yes it is, but each time I tried to connect the Xbox I received an error. The solution? Enable the Guest account on the server. Do this with care – revoke it’s access to everything except the folders you want to stream unless you want to allow read access to everything on the server.

Displaying a SharePoint 2010 library on a page in a different site within the same site collection

One of our customers contacted us the other day with a problem. They wanted to put a view of a document library that was located in the top level site of a site collection onto the landing pages of all the second level sites in that collection. The customer had consulted the internet hive mind and found a blog post with instructions which had been diligently followed and yet whenever a user clicked ‘New’ on the ribbon bar an error occurred.

Making SharePoint 2010 search pages work with a proper master page

If you talk to those who know me about my pet hates in SharePoint, the search pages will come up every time. It’s not that I hate search itself – that’s great, but the minimal.master is just plain annoying. It makes the search centre a black hole into which you can fall but not navigate out of – there’s no navigation and the portal site connection doesn’t work. I’ve been meaning to get search working with a real master page (step forwards, v4.

Content type replication not working on imported or migrated site collections

A while ago I posted about a hidden feature that was needed if you want to use Managed Metadata columns in your SharePoint 2010 sites. We were doing some 2007-2010 migration work for a client recently that also involved exporting and importing sites and site collections to rework the content structure. Once we’d got the new structure sorted we discovered that content type replication was not occurring on the site collections we had imported.