SharePoint Service Pack 2 Pains

I finally bit the bullet and decided to upgrade our SharePoint farm yesterday. I’d been holding off for a while because of time constraints and because of a known issue with Project Server, also part of our farm.

I took careful steps to increment the farm from the SP1+Infrastructure update all the way through each CU up until the service pack. That all worked fine. It was when I tried SP2 I hit problems.

The first issue was that once I’d installed the WSS patch, the Sp2 patch refused to install. Rebooting the server then caused chaos as all my services complained that the SharePoint DB was the wrong version (too old, because I hadn’t run the config wizard yet).

Andy and I spent a long time poking the server yesterday, and spent time building virtual machines to take over the farm as well. We finally knocked it on the head just shy of midnight and left the server in the state it was, trying to start the upgrade installer.

When I got in this morning, the upgrade had installed. I’m guessing that the problems we were seeing were related to services starting and needing time to fail, and we simply hadn’t given them enough time to fail (mind you, the paranoid disk integrity check took a while…)

Much happier, I started the upgrade wizard. Which promptly failed. The logs showed the following:

[WebApplicationSequence] [ERROR] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]: Action 12.0.4.0 of Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Upgrade.WebApplicationSequence failed. [WebApplicationSequence] [ERROR] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]: Feature '20477d83-8bdb-414e-964b-080637f7d99b' is not installed in this farm, and can not be added to this scope. [WebApplicationSequence] [ERROR] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]:    at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeatureCollection.AddInternal(Guid featureId, SPFeaturePropertyCollection properties, Boolean force, Boolean fMarkOnly)    at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeatureCollection.Add(Guid featureId, Boolean force)    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Upgrade.ActivatePublisingTimerJobsWebAppFeature.Upgrade()    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPActionSequence.Upgrade() [ActivatePublisingTimerJobsWebAppFeature] [12.0.4.0] [DEBUG] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]: Begin Rollback() [ActivatePublisingTimerJobsWebAppFeature] [12.0.4.0] [DEBUG] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]: End Rollback() [ActivatePublisingTimerJobsWebAppFeature] [12.0.4.0] [DEBUG] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]: Begin Dispose() [ActivatePublisingTimerJobsWebAppFeature] [12.0.4.0] [DEBUG] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]: End Dispose() [ActivatePublisingTimerJobsWebAppFeature] [12.0.4.0] [DEBUG] [5/27/2009 7:48:09 AM]: Elapsed time: 00:00:00.0312496.

A quick dig with our old friend google turned up a couple of similar posts from Jukka on Moss and MySharePointofView so I had a look at the 12 hive and to my surprise found that there was no folder for the PublishingTimerJobs feature. I copied it from one of the new servers, already patched to SP2 and ran the command:

stsadm –o installfeature –name PublishingTimerJobs

That succeeded. I then followed with the old favourite:

psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b –force

That upgrade has just completed. No project-related errors, just success, so I add my experience to the collective.