Tuesday 1 September 2009

SBS 2008 – SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 Choke

We have mentioned in the past to hold off on installing that service pack:

We happened to have one of our SBS 2008 hosting servers come free today, so we took a chance on installing SharePoint v3 Service Pack two and sure enough things went sideways.

The default fix from the SBS Blog does not work for us either:

Another aspect to this situation: The Service Pack kills the TS Gateway service and thus kills any possibility of gaining remote access to the box via RWW or RDP.

If VPN is not configured on the box, which is the case in many of our client locations, then we would be in a real pickle.

Updating Rule #1: Always have an out-of-band management access on servers being updated.

Some of them are:

Otherwise we are asking someone to go to the console to log on and either get the services back up and running, reboot the server, or help with the troubleshooting process. All are not very viable options.

So, now we are in the process of troubleshooting the hosed SharePoint install. Fortunately we have out-of-band access.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

stryqx said...

Just because TS Gateway is down doesn't mean RDP is down. You simply need to get to it via a different mechanism. Port forwarding 3389 is one way. Installing SSH on the SBS 2008 box and using port tunnelling is another.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Chris,

Good thought ... I am very careful about opening 3389 to the Internet. But, in the case of running updates it would be a possible temporary alternative.

I still prefer the out-of-band management abilities just in case the OS takes a dive.

Thanks,

Philip