SSL Only Portal vs. SP2 Schema
Ok so back in November I wrote an article on WSS SP2 Automatic Upgrade Problems which I am glad to say has helped 50 different people that I know about. Lots of issues with SP2 and automatic updates. To this point I had thought I had seen it all, that was until today. One of my large clients (about 25k users) today was doing some stress testing and discovered some issues. Now I will save the long story for another post but as we were troubleshooting these issues I discovered that on one of the portals the database schema had not been updated. It was still running at SP1 level of:
• ShemaVersion 2.0.40.0
• BuildVersion 11.0.5704.0
Instead of SP2 levels:
• ShemaVersion 2.0.40.1
• BuildVersion 11.0.8126.0
UGH! O’well. I knew that I could just run my force upgrade from the previous post and all would be fixed. Turns out I am not a know it all. :( That didn’t change anything. So then I do some digging and try a KB article (KB 907308) that I found from a Keith Richie post that shows you how to reset the registry to do the upgrade. I make the change and cross my fingers….NOTHING. :( I do now have a message in event viewer that ends in:
Consult the ReadMe file included with this patch, or *_spsadmin.log for more details.
Interesting. So I go looking for the admin log that is located in c:\program files\sharepoint portal server\logs and find lots of errors. The one that jumps out at me though is:
Portal site https://portal/ could not be updated because an exception was thrown: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The server instance specified was not found. Please specify the server's address and port
Well then. That is interesting that the server knows what portal to look for but can’t find it. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the portal only runs on https any call you make to http://portal gets redirected to the https address by a separate IIS virtual server? Could this really be a problem? Only one way to find out. So I quickly stop the redirect on port 80 and reconfigure the portal to http. Now quickly make the registry changes, restart the SharePoint Administration service, and make a bad joke to break the strained moment of silence. What happens???? It works. HOORAY!
I would like to report that we did lots of testing and configuration variance to find that exact reasons this was the issue but that would be a lie. It updated the schema and we moved on. Lots of other tweaks to make.
Hopefully this helps someone work through their issue one day. The real moral of this I believe is if you are going to use SharePoint in an SSL only environment with basic authentication you better be prepared to implement some work arounds. Like KB 891538 that tells you what to do to get search to work in this scenario. :) Good times, good times, good times had by all.
Shane
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