This article mainly discusses on the steps to be performed if you happen to come across a scenario where the “C drive”  is filled in the SharePoint server. In our environment we have the SharePoint Servers installed on the C drive and it’s very important that we maintain an adequate amount of free space in the C drive for SharePoint to function seamlessly.

Please use the WinDirStat tool to check the contents in the C drive .This will give you a detailed information about all the folders in the C drive and thus can be used to identify the folders which is larger in space.

WinDirStat Tool:

       WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions.

On start up, it reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

1. The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,

2. The tree map, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,

3. The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

WinDirStat Tool download link :_ http://filehippo.com/download_windirstat/

Listed below are few scenarios that can contribute to the C disk space increase:

1. The Windows update option is set as “ Download updates but let me choose whether to install them”

  If you choose this option in the “Windows update center” then the Windows update service will start to automatically download the updates from the Microsoft Update server and will be waiting for us to install it. The update files in this case will be automatically downloaded to the Software distribution folder(C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download) increasing the C drive space.

Fix:  Please make sure that this option is set to “Check for updates but let me choose whether to install them “. In this case the download center won’t download any updates from the Microsoft servers unless and until we manually click on the “download “button to download the updates. Hence this won’t result in unnecessary disk space increase.

2. Check whether “Diagnostic Logging” is set to “Verbose” in Central Administration. If that’s the case then the log file size will increase rapidly resulting in a disk space increase.

Note:  However, this depends on the path configured for “Diagnostic Logging “.If its set to some other drive other than the “C drive “ then there shouldn’t be any problem.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748619(v=office.14).aspx

3. Check the space consumed by the logged in user profiles. This can be done by navigating to System properties à User profiles. Check whether the space consumed by all the user profiles is normal .If you see any abnormal increase in the space consumed by any user profile then please go ahead and delete that profile by selecting that user profile and clicking on the “delete” button.

Note: If you delete the user profile from “System properties” then this will remove the user profile from the registry as well. The next time someone logs into the server with that account, a new user profile will be created for that account.

This post is intended for those who are seeing an error as shown in the image below while accessing the “My Tasks” link in your SharePoint My site. As you all know for yourself the “My Task” link which you see in your SharePoint My site is driven by the “Work Management Service application” and it’s necessary to ensure that the WMA service is turned on and configured to run successfully. While I say the WMA service is the one that takes care of the “My Task “list that’s not the only component on which the “My Task “  list relies upon . There are couple of other dependencies such as “Search crawl” and “User Profile service” which takes care of the “My Task “list.

The “My Task” list in your SharePoint My site can display three different type of tasks ….

1. The tasks assigned to you from Outlook ( this is possible only when you’re running Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013…they both need to be running on 2013 version )
2. The tasks assigned to you from MS Project if you have that running in your environment and have configured that to sync with SharePoint.
3. The tasks assigned to you using the default SharePoint “Task list “.

The Work Management Service Application provides functionality to aggregate tasks to a central location on SharePoint Server:

1. Users get the possibility to view and track their to-dos and tasks.
2. Tasks can be cached to a user’s personal site.
3. Tasks can sync to Outlook where users can edit them wherever they have access to Outlook.
4. Tasks can be aggregated from Exchange, Project Server and SharePoint.
5. Based on ‘Provider model’ so that other systems can be integrated in the future.

Now, if the WMA (Work Management Service Application ) is not configured properly then you might end up seeing an error as shown in the figure below and you need to perform the below mentioned troubleshooting steps to get this fixed.

Troubleshooting steps to fix this error:

1. The Work Management Service Application should use the same account as the web application.
2. Verify whether the service account for Work Management Service application has full control permissions on the User Profile Service application on Central Administration.
3. Verify whether the service account for Work Management Service application has full control permissions on the Work Management Service application on Central Administration.
4. Ensure that you do the above mentioned steps on the instance of the service application which is connected to the My site web application.
5. Grant “Full Control” to the work management service account on the User Profile service application using “administrators” button on the ribbon.
6. In addition to that grant “Full control” to the work management service account on the user profile service application using the “permissions” button on the ribbon.
7. Ensure that the work management service account is given appropriate permissions in the “My site” content database.
8. Check whether the service account of the Work management service application is equal to the identity of the web application pool because this could be an issue with the permissions too.
9. Restart the Work management service and the user profile service on the servers.
10. Perform an IIS reset.
11. If this didn’t help ,please run the below mentioned PowerShell command

Run the PowerShell command to grant content access to a process account to the MY SITE web application:

• $webApp = Get-SpWebApplication [URL of the MYSite web application
  $webapp.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity(“[Work Management account]”)

• Note: this should do three things:
•      Add the work management account to the user policy of the web application
•      Add the work  management account to the config database with the permissions of     WSS_Content_Application_Pools
•      Add the work management account to the My Site content database with the permissions of SPDataAccess.

12. Perform an IIS reset once done and also restarting the server and critical services is recommended.

IMPORTANT:

The tasks are stored in a hidden list called “WmaAggregatorList_User” at the personal site of individual users.

WMA aggregates tasks from SharePoint lists created in SharePoint Server (internally called TasksWithTimelineAndHierarchy-171) plus upgraded SharePoint lists from earlier versions of SharePoint (internally called Task-107 or GanttTasks-150).

The Distributed Cache plays an important role in SharePoint Server 2013 as it’s a key component for performance and caching. Distributed Cache is not a SharePoint service, it’s a standalone service called AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server. SharePoint Server 2013 requires Windows Server App Fabric and the App Fabric 1.1 CU 1 (KB 2671763) to be installed .It takes care and improves the performance of the following features in SharePoint Server 2013:

• Authentication
• Newsfeeds
• OneNote client access
• Security Trimming
• Page load performance

This document explains in detail about the procedure to be followed for patching the App Fabric component in Windows Server. An App Fabric Cumulative Update is exactly the same as a CU for SharePoint, it contains all previous CUs. So if we install CU6 you also get CU1 to CU5 installed.

List of App Fabric 1.1 Cumulative Updates:

• CU1 – KB2671763
• CU2 – KB2716015
• CU3 – KB2787717
• CU4 – KB2800726
• CU5 – KB2932678
• CU5 – KB2932678
• CU6 – KB3042099

Note: If you want to identify the version of App Fabric installed in your machine and also the CU version which is installed, please go to the “Programs and Features” section in Control panel and take a look at installed updates.

1. The version number would be listed there.
2. The installed CU would also be listed there with the corresponding KB number.

System Requirements:

1. Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 32-bit or 64-bit.
2. Before applying the cumulative update, make sure you have administrative privileges on the computer where you’re installing this software.
3. To apply this cumulative update package, we must have AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server installed. Additionally, we should also have the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 installed.
4. A system restart is required after installing the Cumulative Update.

Now let’s take a look on the steps to be followed for installing the CU on a server running SharePoint 2013.

Listed below are the steps to be followed for applying the App Fabric CU’s:

1. Please download the CU from Microsoft download center .I’m considering the CU 6 here. Download link for App Fabric 1.1. CU 6 :_ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3042099
2. Once done downloading the cumulative update package to the server in which you’re going to run it, please run the below mentioned to gracefully shutdown the service instance on the local machine.

Stop-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance –Graceful

3. This command will gracefully shutdown the service instance on the local machine. A graceful shutdown means that all the cache items will be distributed to the other service instances in the cache cluster.
4. Wait for minutes to make sure that all the cached items has properly propagated to the other servers.
5. Now it’s time to run the package, run the patch executable and follow the instructions. It’s basically a next, next, finish procedure. The App Fabric 1.1 CU 6 doesn’t need any specific change to be made on the exe.config  file like how CU 3 did. So please proceed further by clicking next.
6. Once you’re done installing the CU, please restart the computer.
7. When the machine is back online, please run the below mentioned command to start the service instance again. The App Fabric Windows Service will be disabled when its shutdown and we are not supposed to start it manually. Please use the below mentioned PowerShell command to do that.

$instanceName =”SPDistributedCacheService Name=AppFabricCachingService”

$serviceInstance = Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq $instanceName -and ($_.server.name) -eq $env:computername}

$serviceInstance.Provision()

8. This command will turn on the Distributed Cache service instance on the machine and will start the AppFabric Windows Service.
9. Once you’re done completing all the above mentioned steps you’re now ready to move on to the next machine.
10. Please allow some time for the newly patched cache service instance to catch up.
11. Finally run the below mentioned commands to check if the Distributed cache service is back online.

To see what  Distributed cache-servers SharePoint thinks there are run this:

Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq “SPDistributedCacheService              Name=AppFabricCachingService”} | select Server, Status

For AppFabric run this from a machine already in the cache-cluster:

Use-CacheCluster

Get-CacheHost

12. This will confirm whether the Distributed cache service is back online from a SharePoint as well as from an App Fabric perspective.
13. For any reason, if you don’t see the status of the servers as “online”, please go ahead and run the below mentioned command to remove and re-add the Distributed Cache Service Instance.

To remove:  Remove-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance

To Add   :    Add-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance

14. Run the remove command first and then wait for couple of minutes and then run the add command.
15. At last, once everything looks fine you’re good to go ahead and patch the second server following the same steps mentioned above.

The Distributed Cache plays an important role in SharePoint Server 2013 as it’s a key component for performance and caching. Distributed Cache is not a SharePoint service, it’s a standalone service called AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server. SharePoint Server 2013 requires Windows Server App Fabric and the App Fabric 1.1 CU 1 (KB 2671763) to be installed .It takes care and improves the performance of the following features in SharePoint Server 2013:

• Authentication
• Newsfeeds
• OneNote client access
• Security Trimming
• Page load performance

It’s always quite comfortable to manage Distributed Cache in SharePoint Server 2013 using PowerShell and the same applies while troubleshooting it also .This articles discusses on the useful PowerShell commands that can be used to troubleshoot Distributed Cache service in SharePoint Server 2013.

In addition to the commands listed above there are couple of other things which you’re supposed to know while troubleshooting Distributed Cache Service/App Fabric.

1. Query AppFabric for Caching Servers/Statuses :

To get the list of servers that AppFabric thinks there should in the cluster run “Get-CacheHost” (use “Use-CacheCluster” if necessary). This command gives us the list of the servers and also their availability status as far as AppFabric’s concerned.

2. Query SharePoint for Caching Servers/Statuses :

To do the same for SharePoint, run:

Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq “SPDistributedCacheService Name=AppFabricCachingService”} | select Server, Status

This will give you the same kind of data but from SharePoint perspective.  Make sure all the servers show the status as “Online” but more importantly that both SP & AF have the same names between them. If you see “cacheHostInfo is null” somewhere then it’s quite likely there’s a mismatch here.

What if one or more App Fabric Service Instance is disabled?

Run the below mentioned PowerShell command …..

Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq “SPDistributedCacheService Name=AppFabricCachingService”} | select Server, Status

If any status shows as “disabled” then we have a problem and in that case please perform the below mentioned steps:

1. Remove the service-instance (see above).
2. Try re-adding it with Add-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance
3. Verify the new service-instance is “online”.

If for some reason Add-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance doesn’t give you a healthy endpoint, try running Remove-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance then Add-SPDistributedCacheServiceInstance on the server in question. If you still can’t get a healthy endpoint then it needs some serious consideration.

Command to Stop and Start the Distributed Cache service:

To start the Distributed Cache service by using Windows PowerShell:

At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, run the following command:

$instanceName =”SPDistributedCacheService Name=AppFabricCachingService”

$serviceInstance = Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq $instanceName -and ($_.server.name) -eq $env:computername}

$serviceInstance.Provision()

To stop the Distributed Cache service by using Windows PowerShell :

At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, run the following command:

$instanceName =”SPDistributedCacheService Name=AppFabricCachingService”

$serviceInstance = Get-SPServiceInstance | ? {($_.service.tostring()) -eq $instanceName -and ($_.server.name) -eq $env:computername}

$serviceInstance.Unprovision()