Thursday, January 18, 2007

MOSS Danger! Don't modify the fieldtype without making a backup!

Well what happened to me was the following, I had an Issuelist (migrated from a Wssv2) and was playing with the new opties that are available for a Multiline text fieldtype. I enabled the "Append Changes to Existing Text " function on a required field column. By doing this the values remained but everytime I edited an issue, while the field was filled in, the form requested that I need to fill in the field. This is not very desirable for a field that is only required to be filled in at creation time. So I disabled the 'Append Changes to Existing Text' and was then suprised to find out that for all the existing items the field values were deleted!!! Lesson learned : never (!) change the type of a (even it is an adjustment of the current type) field without making a backup or test it thoroughly!

Thursday, January 11, 2007

MOSS 2007: Installation error :\

UPDATE:

Fixed! Problem was that the WMI service did not function properly. Apparently during the creation of the configuration - and admin database, Sharepoint wants to get some information through the WMI interface. The cause that the WMI service did not function properly lies in the fact that the Windows Firewall and ICS service were running. Once I turned the service off and restarted the WMI service, the WMI service worked. The reason why i figured it had something to do was the cause of the error: System.Management.ManagementException: Initialization failure -----------------------------------------------------------------

We have an environment which consists of : - Windows 2003 Server + IIS with a SPS 2003 environment (Front-end server) - Windows 2003 Server + SQL Server 2000 with sp4 installed (Back-end server) With two service accounts that both have local administrator rights + the necessary database rights. Now everything works fine for the SPS 2003 environment but when I want to upgrade to MOSS2007 using the gradual upgrade method (I've not tried to the inplace upgrade but I did try the "new install" method and it gave the same error) i get the following error when I ran the Sharepoint Configuration Wizard (step 2)

01/10/2007 10:56:16 10 ERR Task configdb has failed with an unknown exception 01/10/2007 10:56:16 10 ERR Exception: System.Management.ManagementException: Initialization failure at System.Management.ManagementScope.Initialize() at System.Management.ManagementObject.Initialize(Boolean getObject) at System.Management.ManagementClass.GetInstances(EnumerationOptions options) at System.Management.ManagementClass.GetInstances() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAdministrationServiceUtilities.GetWindowsDirectory() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAdministrationServiceUtilities.GetWindowsTempDirectory() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer.GetWindowsTempDirectory() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer.StaticProvision(SPConfigurationDatabase configurationDatabase) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Join() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.CreateOrConnectConfigDb() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.Run() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask() When I look on the database server, I see that the two databases are created (Sharepoint_Config & Sharepoint_Admin_Content).

Things I've tried to resolve it: 1. Created the databases before running the Configuration Wizard using SQL Enterprise Manager 2. Attempted to use the precreated databases using the PSConfig cmdline tool I think it has something to do with not having set the proper rights to the service accounts. And for the simplicity I've only used one account which is : - local administrator on each machine - got every 'server role' as a database user on the database server What suprises me btw was that the machine account of the front-end server was added as a user in the database. And another thing wat suprises me is that the databases are in fact created, thus the account has proper rights but it failed to do something I cannot get my grips on :(

So please help! :)