Monthly Archives: September 2012

A few quick commands to tell if FAST search is working

This post applies to users of Microsoft FAST search for SharePoint 2010.

Here are a few commands you can run on the FAST server to see if it’s healthy and also to get a feel if the back end is working in co-operation with the front end crawlers.

nctrl status will show if all the fast services are started and running.

indexerinfo status dumps some xml -the key piece here is the partitions – if you run indexerinfo status a few times, you should see some movement on these (percents will change)

SharePoint 2010 Session State Service

Sharepoint has two state service commands that threw me for a loop

first there is get-SPSessionStateService
then there is get-SPStateServiceApplication

Here’s an article from MSDN that talks about the differences
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/markarend/archive/2010/05/27/using-session-state-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

In Central Admin->Manage Service Applications these show up as follows:

Get-SPSessionStateService -> shows as type “SharePoint Server ASP.NET Session State Service”
Get-SPStateServiceApplication-> shows as type “State Service” and hopfully “State Service Proxy”

While you can easily delete both from Central admin, you can create neither of them from the service applications page.

Creating a new SPStateServiceApplication (and proxy) is relatively easy: 3 lines of powershell:

# from  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee704548.aspx
$serviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name ""
New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name "" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp
New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name "" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp -DefaultProxyGroup

Creating a new SPSessionStateService, on the other hand is a little more involved…

How do I know?

I’m glad you asked….

I ran into an issue where an access report would not display because “session state is not turned on” it didn’t say which one, and through some trial and error, I now understand it was likely looking for the service returned by get-SPSessionStateService.

For me that returned a blank line with no database entry so I thought I’d be best to delete it and recreate it from scratch.

I was wrong.

While deleting and recreating the SPStateServiceApplication is easy, the SPSessionStateService was not easily done in SP2010 with the included powershell commands.

Fortunately I found this article: http://ikarstein.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/error-while-enabling-session-state-service-on-sharepoint-2010/ Which had the steps to recreate the service manually.

I enabled the ASP.Net state windows service, then followed the article above, stopping about half way through, before the provisioning part.

To Provision it, I used Enable-SPSessionStateService -DefaultProvision

Get-SPSessionStateService now returns a complete row, with a database server, and DB name, and ID and best of all Enabled = True

So to summarize my problem,
MS Access services reports needed “SPSessionStateService” which also uses the windows service “ASP.Net State Service”

In troubleshooting, I wasn’t aware of the difference between states so I deleted the “wrong” one in an attempt to reset it.
A little digging and I now have a better understanding of the issue and of the two different state services.

I hope this helps!