Although Urban Legend (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146336/) is a movie, in IT they could easily turn into a cult TV serie spanning over more than 12 seasons…
Here are 4 SharePoint-related episodes transcripts for today:
DNS Round-Robin can be used as inexpensive high availability method
No, 200% no! DNS RR is just a way to alternate the order of address returned to a client for a given DNS name. In short, it does do load balancing but it is the client’s responsibility to “test” the availability of the server targeted and take the appropriate action. If you have 2 SharePoint WFE configured with RR and one is down, there will still be about 50% of requests to that box and therefore, failing…
WebDAV protocol used by SharePoint is not served by IIS. So stopping IIS will not prevent WebDAV requests to be served.
Wow, how many have I heard that one? Not only IIS serves WebDAV requests but SharePoint also implements its own WebDAV component. So in short, everything goes via IIS, you DO NOT NEED WebDAV server extensions installed and you can disable WebDAV on a per web application-basis using the Central Admin web site.
If you use a firewall between client and SharePoint WFE, you need to open dynamic ports because RPC protocol is used.
Totally wrong but certainly caused by the fact that one the HTTP extension used by SharePoint is often named FP-RPC (FrontPage RPC). It has nothing to do with standard RPC or even RPC encapsulation inside HTTP actually. It is only a kind of WebDAV on steroids, used by Office Applications or sometimes by Windows Web Folders when communicating with SharePoint WFE. So stick to simple the FW rules: 80 or optionally 443 in case SSL is used.
Index role is never redundant; there can be only one server with Index role per farm
Talking about MOSS in particular here. Actually, the reality is “there can be only one Index role per Shared Service Provider (SSP). So multiple SSP may mean multiple Index roles on one or multiple physical servers.
And cut!