KB934525 screwed things up...

Last week I had a customer with a major MOSS 2007 problem.

First the situation:
He had a WSS 3.0 environment first, which was already used in the company. Then he installed MOSS 2007 on top of it.
At that point, still only the original WSS sites were in use. Then he applied the KB934525 security update. This broke the new portal he recently set up, but the original WSS sites were still working. Fixes described on several places on the internet did not work.

I was there to do my part in the migration (physical to virtual) of practically all the servers. So in the new environment we wanted to have a clean (not updated with a dodgy KB934525 patch) MOSS 2007 installation. We installed on the new servers a total clean MOSS 2007. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to attach the still working databases, because it came complaining that the installation was too old and we should upgrade... (with KB934525).
And we didn't want to do that.

What did I do:

  1. I set up a little test environment
  2. Updated that environment with KB934525
  3. Attached the production database
  4. Exported the Site Collection using stsadm -o export
  5. Imported the Site Collection as a subsite in our new environment using stsadm -o import

 ... and guess what? It worked. So I downgraded the site, while just using stsadm -o export/import

So now he has a brand new MOSS 2007 environment, with all his old WSS 3.0 content, in a not KB934525 patched environment. Just the way he wanted it.

Keep on turntabling
Tom

Published Monday, November 05, 2007 7:15 PM by Tom Vandaele
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Comments

# re: KB934525 screwed things up...

Wednesday, November 07, 2007 9:40 AM by marcovanschagen

Hi,

We have experienced a site down situation a few weeks ago. We consulted Microsoft on this and actually had a good lengthy session with the engineers. We got it back to working order without reinstall of all the things. I'll log what we have done as parts of it may be of use to you.

We found out a hotfix was loaded with Windows Update, this is the Cumulative Security Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB934525). This loaded itself on october, 10, 2007.

So, we found our websites non responsive, Central Admin is non responsive, and via the management console we were not able to enter

the IIS tree. We found out, the IIS Admin Service was marked as Stopping, but did not stop. We did an IISReset to help the service

stop and restart. IIS is then accessible.

Then we found the SharePoint content database was still inaccessible, found out it was locked to single user. Trying to reboot does not help, still Cannot Connect to Config Database.Then set the database back to multi user with the SQL management studio (or use query analyser) command: ALTER DATABASE [SharePoint_Config_--your guid here--] SET MULTI_USER   -Note, this will probably fail for the database is locked by an other process; find the process number in your current activity and add this line before the command: KILL nn where nn is the process number. Execute both lines in one go. So now

the database is back to normal use.

Still the site does not want to come back. That is when we entered the conference call with Microsoft. Looked at a whole lot of stuff.

Decided the HotFix update did not install correctly, so we tried an inplace forced upgrade of the databases.

   (open a cmd, go to your sharepoint folder) PSCONFIG -cmd upgrade

-inplace b2b -wait -force

Sat back a long time while it is working on all those tasks. It came back with an error (on hind sight this may be faillure on our system to get the services restarted) Then did an IISRESET again, sites were back and operational.

Figured since we had an error, we needed to better confirm things.

There is also in your programs menu a UI command to perform an update

- this does include checking and setting more options compared to the commantline call. We ran this, and sat back. Still an error, in step 10, the last step getting the services back to live. We did spend some time on this error, but basically this was not needed. IISRESET does the trick bringing the services back to live.

We think for some reason, the hotfix failed, and did not perform an update on the databases. You can do this manually as described.

Also we experience a problem with the automated restart of IIS, having the service marked as 'stopping' for forever, and causing a timeout on whatever is waiting (try to do an IISRESET when you see this happen, before the timeout) - we think we may run into trouble for the next hotfix, but that is an other story.

I hope this description helps you.

# re: KB934525 screwed things up...

Wednesday, November 07, 2007 8:22 PM by Tom Vandaele

I do hope that your description helps others with the same problem.

We were in the great situation that

1. the content we needed was still intact

2. the new portal wasn't used yet (clean install)

3. we were migrating servers at that time

Thanks to that situation, we could start over again, with a fresh install without having to apply that update again. (Btw, it also installed due to an automatic update) For us, this was the best solution.

Unfortunately, not everyone is in this situation. For now, I advice people to turn automatic updates off and I hope Service Pack 1 will be kick-ass :-)

T

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