Error changing a site title in SharePoint 2013

Here’s a good one: You have a new 2013 site and attempt to change the Tile, Description, and Logo. You click on the link and get a nice black and white page that says:

A list, survey, discussion board, or document library with the specified title already exists in this Web site.  Please choose another title.

Cool, huh? I found this trying to apply a custom Composed Look to a site. Seems like just about anything causes this error.

Come to find out, the Site Assets library is hosed up. The solution? Here it is step by step:

1. Browse to Site Content and see if the Site Assets library exists. If it does, delete it.
2. If you don’t see it there, open the site in SharePoint Designer and select All Files.
3. See if the Site Assets library is there. If it is, delete it. (I did find it there in my case).
4. Now go back to your site and go to Site Settings then Title, Description, and Logo.

Low and behold! Everything works! If you still have the site open in SPD, hit F5 and you will see that it re-provisioned the Site Assets library.

If this keeps happening, I’m going to write some PowerShell to fix it on site creation. Stay tuned!

 

WSS 3.0 ULS logs empty

You ever do 2 things and then wonder which one actually fixed the issue? Yeah, me too. So here’s what happened: We have a number of site collections on an old WSS 3.0 farm that are not returning search results (more on that later). Microsoft wanted us to turn on verbose logging during a crawl to see what was happening.

To make a long story even longer, the ULS logs were getting generated but were empty. 0 KB. Damn.

Everything revolves around the Windows SharePoint Services Tracing service. That’s the timer job that runs all the logging. This should be running under Local Service. Check. So maybe the farm account can’t write to the log files? Worth a try so I added the farm account to the local group Performance Log Users. Just for drill, I restarted the Windows SharePoint Services Tracing service.

Bingo! Everything worked! Logs are filling up again. So which one fixed it? Who knows? But it works so do both.