How to stop follow sites in Sharepoint Online

Following sites is one of the new features of Sharepoint 2013. It allows users to track sites which are most interesting or relevant for them. In order to follow the site user should click Follow link in top right corner:

It will show message that current site is now followed:

In order to unfollow the site you need to click on Sites link near Office 365 in top left corner:

Here you will see list of all followed site. Near each site there will be context menu which will allow you to unfollow appropriate site:

After you will click “Stop following” site will disappear from the list of followed sites.

Fix “The user does not have permission to perform this action” error from Sharepoint timer service

Recently we faced with the following issue: on one of WFE in production farm the following error from OWSTIMER process flooded the event log:

Unknown SQL Exception 297 occurred. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.  The user does not have permission to perform this action.

This error occurred for all Sharepoint system databases:

• search
• managed metadata
• user profile
• usage and health
• user profile sync
• web analytics reporting

In order to avoid this error we need to grant VIEW SERVER STATE permissions to account which is used for OWSTIMER process. In Sql management studio run the following command:

GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO [domain\user]

After that error should disappear.

How to check in MS Sql Server to what db instance alias belongs to

Db aliases are used as additional level of addressing databases in connection strings: having alias you may change real db instance or even server name without reconfiguration of your apps, because alias will remain the same. But if you see connection string like that:

Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=False;Initial Catalog=MyDatabase;Data Source=test

where “test” specified in Data Source is db alias, how to know to what db instance specified alias belongs to?

The easiest way is to use cliconfg tool. When you run it on the Alias tab you will see list of all used db aliases and real db instances they belong to: