Error: Content Plugin can not be initialized - list of CSS addresses is not set

AutoSPInstaller released a new version last month. To test it, I reinstalled SharePoint 2013 farm (leave the farm, then delete all SharePoint databases). It's almost perfect, except one error:


topology activation failed. no system manager locations set, search application might not be ready yet


Dig into it, I found the error was thrown out by "$clone.Activate()" of "AutoSPInstallerFunctions.ps1".

However, I don't see anything wrong there.

In ULS, there are a lot of error message like below:


Content Plugin can not be initialized - list of CSS addresses is not set

Failed to extract required parameter FastConnector:ContentDistributor, hr=0x80070002  [pluginconfig.cpp:81]  search\native\gather\plugins\contentpi\pluginconfig.cpp

Unable to get systemmanagerlocation from db

Exception stack trace:   
 at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CustomDictionaryDeploymentJobDefinition.ExecuteTimerJob()    
 at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPTimerJobInvokeInternal.Invoke(SPJobDefinition jd, Guid targetInstanceId, Boolean isTimerService, Int32& result)

I am not the first one who got this error.

To confirm the problem is caused by AutoSPInstaller, I reinstalled the farm, but initialized the farm through "SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard". Same error happened again. So, AutoSPInstaller may not be the one we should blame.

After quite a while research, I realized this is not something easy to fix. It may caused by some file or folder created by previous installation, which don't allow current installed components to access it; or some settings pointed to an invalid server.

I don't want to dig out the root cause, but to fix it. So I uninstalled SharePoint, then deleted the folder "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Data\Office Server", then reinstalled SharePoint.

Finally, everything works now.

New tools to help to manage site collections

I always use site collection as the basic unit to build SharePoint platform. So, if possible, I would create separate site collection instead of sub site when new site request pop up.

Inevitable, there will be a lot of site collections in the farm.

That's all right. We keep millions of records in SQL table, and it's much better than keeping them in thousands of files.

But sometimes it's annoying when we need to create, backup, restore or move site collections through PowerShell scripts. That's why I built this tool.

It's easy to write the PowerShell scripts to do the work. However, as a SharePoint administrator, I need to do that many times every week. In that case, this tool is handy.

Give it a try! It doesn't change anything of the SharePoint server, and just generate some PowerShell scripts, which you can run from PowerShell console.

Please let me know if you find anything can be improved, or want to add more functionalities to it.

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SharePoint 2013. Winform tool to generate PowerShell scripts, to move, create, backup and restore site collections.
https://spsiteadmin2013.codeplex.com/

SharePoint 2010. Winform tool to generate PowerShell scripts, to move, create, backup and restore site collections.
https://spsiteadmin2010.codeplex.com/

[update, 2017-02-04]

https://github.com/Eric-Fang/SPSiteAdmin2016

https://github.com/Eric-Fang/SPSiteAdmin2013

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Screenshots: