I am working with a client who has Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, with a Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 Extranet. We wanted to upgrade their searching functionality so we installed Microsoft Search Server Express 2008, which worked a treat. For one day. Then it stopped working. I emptied the index and did a full scheduled index, and the same thing happened – worked for one day, then broken again. My Application event log was filled with the following event log errors:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 9/07/2008
Time: 9:02:57 PM
User: N/A
Computer: AHA001
Description:
#30002: Error 5 opening registry key “SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\Secure\ConfigDb”.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
and:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 9/07/2008
Time: 9:02:57 PM
User: N/A
Computer: AHA001
Description:
(#5: Access is denied.)
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
and by “filled”, I mean 10 of these events every 5 seconds! After messing around for a couple of hours, I pushed this straight to Microsoft support. Give it to the experts to sort out (especially on a Production site – bwaaaaark bwaaaark chicken!).
The reply from MS support was to create a new Shared Services Provider – good enough for me! I tried to delete the existing Shared Services Provider, but of course you are only allowed one in WSS 3.0 so it wouldn’t let me delete the SSP. Cue STSADM.exe with the command:
stsadm -o deletessp -title <SSP Name> -force
and then I was free to create a new SSP via the web interface. It automatically added all my existing WSS 3.0 sites to the list of sites sharing services, and I could successfully start a crawl on the content I wanted.
However, the event log errors remained… hmmmm…. the Event Source says “Windows SharePoint Services 2.0”, that doesn’t look right! Obviously left over from previous install – I have WSS 3.0 and MS Search Server, heck I don’t need that! After carefully backing up my databases (backup your backups, then backup your backups of backups…) I checked the web for uninstalling WSS 2.0 from an SBS server, didn’t find anything bad, followed the instructions here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/829114
and went bravely ahead. Uninstallation successful, but oh-oh… where’s my WSS 3.0 sites! Databases still there, IIS manager says the sites are there, but going to the sites gives me a whole load of nothing! Uh-oh, here comes that sinking feeling…
So I head for the “SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard” and start that up. Hmmmm, no I don’t want to disconnect from my server farm… yes I like that admin site where it is, yes I do have existing content and I don’t want to remove it… so it does it’s job, steps 1-8 completed, and welcome back admin site! Hello existing WSS sites! And goodbye errors every 5 seconds!!!
So… my initial thoughts are that upgrading from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 and then to Search Server Express 2008 causes some issue with the WSS 2.0 site… I had to uninstall WSS 2.0, and then re-run the SharePoint config wizard to restore everything to its rightful place. I could then do a full crawl, and get results back from my search. Huzzah!
Back in Hack 