Rant

Sometimes, it’s good to let off some steam, and actually post a good, old-fashioned rant. Trying to keep them not too ranty, though.

I might post some of my rants on my other website – AntinJaMarin.net, which is actually Finnish for “Antti and Mari’s web” – so it’s a site I share with my wife. Yeah, I wonder how that works out in the long run!

Let off some steam, Bennet
 HA! "Let off some steam, Bennet" - a classic.

How to log in to Microsoft’s websites (MSDN forums, Azure Portal, SharePoint Online) when you get a “Bad Request” error?

Let's fix all the problems!

Every now and then, something like half of Microsoft’s websites will suddenly stop working – this applies to Azure Portal, SharePoint Online sites, MSDN forums and probably a thousand of other sites. The error is most of the time something like this:

Bad Request - Request Too Long
HTTP Error 400. The size of the request headers is too long.

Or like shown below:

Azure Portal error

Azure Portal throwing an error, when checking for existing authentication

This effectively blocks you from accessing the site. Most typically, I’ve encountered this on MSDN forums or Azure Portal – I’ve just faced a very blunt, unfriendly and quite useless error message, like above.

Yet once again, the solution is almost stupidly simple.

Continue reading

Related Posts:

A cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online

Microsoft Stores Backups For 14 Days, But Restores Them in 15

So Microsoft keeps 14-day rolling backups of your SharePoint Online sites. That’s awesome – no need to take backups anymore, right?

Not so fast. It’s not always so easy, and by just relying on these backups, you risk losing your data. Forever, I might add.

This cautionary tale is about SharePoint Online, but I’d say you’ll need to take caution anytime you’re dealing with Microsoft’s automatic backups. The story starts with the client doing something unwise – a prime example would be them removing the root web of their classic SharePoint Site Collection (don’t do that!).  Continue reading

Related Posts:

Materials for my SPS TC session: “Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers” now available!

SPS TC logo

Whoops – this post comes quite late, as the session was a couple of weeks ago already.  I recently had a session at SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities (SPS TC for short) and thought I’d share my materials and document my experiences. Oh, and do the shout-outs, since I referenced some and tools by some extremely talented people!

Continue reading

Related Posts:

One web developer’s story about the downfall of web hosting (EIG / Site5 review) – part 2

EIG sucks, Site5 sucks, Bluehost sucks, Hostgator sucks...

I was able to actually get most of the money EIG got from me back from them by opening a Visa claim. In this short post, I’ll try to explain how you can stop your money from being funneled to EIG’s greedy hands, if your hosting provider was taken over by them.

What happened to Site5 (and others that were savaged by EIG)?

I was a customer of Site5 pretty happily for a long time, until Endurance International Group (EIG) took them over, wrecked their infrastructure, likely moved all of the customer data outside EU (which is against our laws) and let all of the customer support staff go. Site5 was not a cheap service provider, so I hated to see I was paying for premium service, but receiving potatos instead. And of course it was sad to see a once prominent web hosting provider fall to pieces like that.

My earlier post describes my experiences with them a little more accurately.

How to avoid unnecessary trouble with your web hosting? Continue reading

Related Posts:

One web developer’s story about the downfall of web hosting (EIG review) – part 1

EIG is basically a host of scams now.

Okay, so this is going to be a bloggish rant about EIG – Endurance International – a web “hosting” company that’s ruining the web for everyone. If you hate salty rants, browse something else, please.

For a short version, check this out.

I’ve been an independent web developer since around 2004, and even though maintaining and hosting websites is currently more of a hobby than anything else, I still do have a few dozen customers with one or more websites or other systems hosted by me. For more than 10 years I’ve been hosting both my and my customers’ websites on a few different web hosting or cloud providers, and some services on servers I hosted myself. I joined Site5’s customerbase in 2013, after Clients From Hell endorsed them repeatedly (it was a paid promotion – but still, a good word from a trustworthy source). 

Continue reading

Related Posts: