Friday 10 June 2011

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon stuck at “Loading…”

Do you experience the following:
  • The ribbon is stuck at “Loading…” and never comes up, even you are using out of the box SharePoint site template and master page. 
  • Your site is setup with a DNS/host header, rather than the actual machine name.
  • There is a “.” in your DNS host (e.g. sp2010.dev). 
  • The ribbon works if you access the site using FQDN (e.g. sp2010.dev.domain.com)
  • Your SharePoint environment is running on either Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2. 

If you answer “Yes” for all of the questions above, you are in the right place. 

image
This problem is actually caused by a new concept called DNS Devolution that Microsoft introduced in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2.  This concept give a finer controls over how far you search up the tree with an unqualified name.  For example, if you host name is sp2010, Windows will resolve it to sp2010.domain.com.  However, if you have a “.” in your hostname, e.g. sp2010.dev, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 will not append the DNS search suffix to it. 

To solve the ribbon “Loading…” problem, you need to allow DNS suffix append to unqualified multi-label name.  To do that, run gpedit.msc on the server, Browse Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Network > DNS Client.  Enable “Allow DNS Suffix Appending to Unqualified Multi-Label Name Queries”.  Then flush the DNS by running a ipconfig /flushdns in command prompt.  Refresh your site and your ribbon should work!


image

7 comments:

jim.hazell said...

I have followed your clear instructions - thank you, but my stuck on 'loading' problem still persists.. Could you offer any further advice please?

jim.hazell said...

Following my recent post, I have now resolved the problem which was IE8!
Installed Firefox and IE9 - problem resolved!

Anonymous said...

I tried this method as this is the exact problem that I have yet it still persists. Any other suggestions?

Wilson Leung said...

Jim, thanks for the info. I have been testing this on IE9. Not sure how it works on IE8. I might test IE8 when I have a chance.

Wilson Leung said...

Hi J,

Do you have a "." in your host name? And have you execute the flushdns command? What browser are you using? I am testing this on IE9.

Anonymous said...

Hello Wilson, We are running a mixed environment right now. The users that are testing Sharepoint 2010 are using Windows XP and IE7. Through futher testing we discovered that there was a policy being added by our login script that was disabling http 1.1 which is found under the advanced options in IE. We removed this entry and updated to IE8 and this resolved the problem because the users can now enable http 1.1. As a side note some users had to delete there cookies, cache, and history after enabling http 1.1 for it to work. I did brief testing with Windows 7 x86 Pro and IE8 and was only able to resolve this issue after doing a reset of IE8 under advanced options.

Anonymous said...

Hey - I am definitely happy to find this. cool job!