Replacing a SOLR certificate is routine business these days, but something went sideways this time, and I couldn't stop the service, which led to its own problems. In the end I created a self signed one and used that instead, and I'll show you what I did to get the service to respond. 

Ok I admit it. I took the easy way out. I was setting up a test environment of two instances using the standalone graphical installer and once done, I switched their roles. Everything worked except for one thing; the Experience Profile dashboard.

I'm going through a project right now where I need to duplicate some vanilla environments. Due to resource locations being spread out I decided a manual clone was the easiest and fastest path, so today I'll share the process of cloning a Sitecore installation with SQL in Azure, and SOLR in a dedicated VM.

I recently migrated a project to a new environment, only to find that rendering a date field was inconsistently working. Not Sitecore's fault, but I've never seen this before, and I know as a seasoned developer I should have all (ok most) of the answers. It's a good catch and I wanted to share.

You know the deal. Before going live, you check for all use cases in your site, including 404 URLs. You'd assume broken links will route a User to said 404 pages, but you'd be wrong, and the result won't be what your content team is looking for.

A common question raised in the community is, “How do I unlock a Sitecore account due to bad password attempts?”. The fix is easy enough with a simple SQL command, but why not use a task that will do this for you? Let's go over the direct fix using SQL and an automated way as well.

The upgrade folder is a great place to have handy during the installation of a package. It will hold information and items related to what you just installed, like logs, backup of files, what was deleted, etc. While browsing about a new Sitecore Managed Cloud installation I couldn't find it, but there's a patch to resolve the issue.

We recently rolled out a new Sitecore implementation where GeoIp was used. I'm proud of this one because we developed a neat geospatial lookup with caching that was quite efficient. All went well through QA, UAT, and even Production environment testing. Once live though, it was a different story.

Out of all the Sitecore projects we've rolled out, I've never had an issue around hard drive space. Our latest client launched their MVP phase a couple months ago, and to my surprise I got a drive space alert in Azure Managed Cloud. After a few checks it turns out the mediaIndexing folder is the offending party, and at 150gb+, that's a big offense!

If you've read my article, Providing External Access for the Xp Single Developer Installation, you'd know there was some certificate work to be done. Well, today's the day I need to replace these certs with new ones, so let's walk through the steps together.