Khalids Technical Diary

So I had this weird problem. Any new site collection or subsite we created even as the system account would give us the above error. Although we could navigate the site but we could not activate the publishing features or navigate to the landing page. I went scratching in the web.config and noted the following from a working environment vs the broken one:

Broken Web APP
<add key="aspnet:AllowAnonymousImpersonation" value="true" />

Working Web APP
<add key="aspnet:AllowAnonymousImpersonation" value="false" />

I made this change and all was sorted

So a client recently experienced this issue when they were trying to use a site template they had created. Upon investigation it turns out that a content type in the content type hub had a few null values. I confirmed this by unpacking the wsp and checking the ElementsFields.xml and noted that there were a few values set to ''. I found this nifty little script online @ http://sharepointfeaturesandfailures.blogspot.com/2013/09/fixing-missing-hidden-and-sealed.html. I ran the script on the content type hub URL so that it could replicate across all sites where it was having the issue. We then recreated the site template and bam all was good!

So I was receiving tons of missing WebPart errors for the following GUIDS in Health Analyser:

So everyone by now should have had a taste of 2013 if not what are you doing!!! With every new technology comes new pains as well as some good things one of my pains went something along the lines of:
"A certificate validation operation took 30007.5449 milliseconds and has exceeded the execution time threshold.  If this continues to occur, it may represent a configuration issue.  Please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=246987 for more details."

*Shock horror* my logs were inundated with errors of the like also I was having tons of topology errors and endpoint failures. Now I popped open MMC and added the certificates snap in and selected local computer to check what certificate was causing me this grief.

I navigated to the SharePoint folder and opened one of the certificates and noted the following:

Aha!! Found you. I actually never found it as fast as I made it out to be. Once I narrowed it down I then remembered that I had something similar before and had to generate a cert via powershell. So I done the following in the SharePoint Management Shell:

$rootCert = (Get-SPCertificateAuthority).RootCertificate
$rootCert.Export(“Cer”) | Set-Content C:\root.cer –Encoding Byte

Once done I went back into the certificates snap in and imported the certificate into the trusted root certificate authorities. Once done the bulk of the errors disappeared and my logs looked much better and I had no more topology errors as well. Now for the last few remaining cert errors (1 or 2 per hour) I checked the local computer policy. Pop Open gpedit.msc and navigate to "Computer Configuration > Windows > Security Settings > Public Key Policies > Certificate Path Validation Settings". On the Network Retrieval tab, define the policy and uncheck “Automatically update certificates in the Microsoft Root Certificate Program. After you have defined this run a gpupdate /force and you should no longer have these errors in your event logs

I was creating metadata columns in a Content type hub when I noticed I could not access the termstore instead I received the error in the subject. I done some research and found that it was a hidden feature that was not enabled that could not be activated via the UI. Hello powershell :D I ran the following and all was good:

Enable-SPFeature -id "73ef14b1-13a9-416b-a9b5-ececa2b0604c" -Url <Site-Url>

Run the following via powershell substituting the placeholders with the relevant information of your environment:
Set-SPMetadataServiceApplication -Identity "<ServiceApplication>" -HubURI "<HubURI>"

This list is usually not editable but you can edit it by going to http://SITECOLLECTIONNAME//_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

You will then be able to remove the old users and they should then not appear in people picker.