"Round Robin Service Load Balancer Event"

After installing SharePoint, you might see many error messages in the event log along the lines of: SharePoint Web Services Round Robin Service Load Balancer Event: EndpointFailure.

If you do, you're not alone.

Information about this error message is, at the time of writing, difficult to find. However, a Technet forum suggests that this is related to the SharePoint 2010 December Cumulative Update.

Indeed, we had applied this to the farm. However, I can also confirm that the February Update does not fix the issue.

stsadm "the server instance specified was not found"

When running an stsadm command that requires the "url" parameter, you may see the error message "the server instance specified was not found".

If you are doing this within a multi-server farm environment, consider on which server you are running the command.

Is it an application server or a web-front-end server? If it's the former, the server won't be running the "web application" service, which is required for the command to work properly.

Spence Harbar

If Spence Harbar played football, we'd all be singing "There's only one Spence Harbar".

Why do I say that? Read on...

When building a SharePoint 2010 server farm, (in my opinion) the most tricky bits to get right are: User Profile synchronization and Kerberos.

If you are planning to work in these areas and you haven't already come across Spence Harbar, I urge you take a look at his blog before you start.

He's produced some step-by-step guides for a successful installation, based on real-world examples and corrects some widely-held misconceptions.

Check out his posts here: User Profiles and Kerberos.

SharePoint “Unable to process Create message”

You may see this error message when you try to create a new User Profile connection: “Unable to process Create message”.

This can be caused for a number of reasons. However, in our case this was because:

1. Our servers / user accounts were installed in an Active Directory whose Netbios name was different to the Fully Qualified Domain Name.
2. The SharePoint 2010 December Cumulative Update had been applied to the farm.

This is a known issue, which Microsoft is investigating.

SharePoint "The Product ID specified was not found"

Today I started the installation of a 4 server farm. The SharePoint 2010 setup media had been copied into a network folder location. I chose to copy that folder to all of the SharePoint servers, so that the setup program would run locally, rather than come across the network.

On each SharePoint server I ran the setup program and installed the prerequisites. This worked fine.

On one server, I then tried to install the main SharePoint program files but I got the following message: "The product ID specified was not found on the machine", as shown below.

Oddly this acutally worked on one of the servers, but for the other 3 it failed.

I can only assume that copying the setup folder to each server had somehow corrupted the files. Anyhow, the solution was instead to mount an ISO image as an optical drive on all servers, and that worked.