Unable to connect to internet in Virtual PC

I ran into this issue recently. I installed Microsoft Virtual PC on my host machine running Windows XP. Created a new Virtual PC and installed Windows Service Pack3 on it. By default the Networking adapter is set to the physical network adapter of the host machine. Everything looked good so I fired up my new VPC, opened the browser and tried accessing some site. Problem!

So I decided to change the Network work adapter of the VPC to Shared Netowrking (NAT). In this mode VPC would share the network connection available on the host machine instead connecting directly to the network adapter on the host machine. But still no luck.

In both cases I could ping the host machine from the Virtual PC. Which meant there is network connection on VPC but something is preventing internet connections. The first thing to look at in such scenario would be Firewall. So I decided to quickly check if disabling the firewall on the VPC would do the trick. That didn't make any difference. Note disabling firewall is not a good idea. I was just using to narrow the issue down. So I turned the firewall back on on the VPC.

The next step was to look at the Firewall on the host machine. Instead of disabling the firewall this time I looked at the Exception tab of the firewall configuration window. This tab basically lists the applications that have previlages to pass through the firewall. I decided to add Microsoft Virtual PC into the list. After adding it to the list, clicked on the "Add Port" button and added port 80. That's it!!! The problem is fixed. Hope this helps some one. Drop a line if this worked or you have any comments.

File not found when recreating a sub site in SharePoint

For whatever reason I had to delete a sub site that I create under the default team site in SharePoint. The deleting is easy. But when you try to recreate the same site again you would get

File not found followed by a stack trace

Just restarting the IIS should fix the problem

File Not Found when creating a new site in SharePoint

I ran into this problem when creating a new sub site (Sites and Workspaces) under the default team site that gets created when you install SharePoint Services. I would get File Not Found every time I tried creating a new site under the main site. Though I found lot of information on the internet on resolving the issue, none of them worked for me.

The solution is very simple. Under STN Team Site > Site Settings > Sites and Workspaces click on "Site Creating Permission" button. Select the "Design" permission level and click OK. That's it, now you should be able to create any number of new sites.

The error File Not Found is miss leading when the issue is related to permissions.