SPS installation woes

Wednesday, June 16 2004 - Blog

Searching google groups for "failed to create portal successfully"group:microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.* returns 120 results

"portal creation failed" group:microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.* returns 86 results.

I have read most of them and few seem to offer any resolution, there are ALOT of very unhappy people out there.

Unlike most people I am only reaching a very early stage in theportal creation process, most seem to get past the 'extending virtualserver' step, but I don't. The app pool identity has therequired privileges on the remote SQL server (database creators role)and local admin rights on the IIS server.

22:41:32 Checking virtual server state.
22:41:32 Virtual server needs extend.
22:41:32 Extending virtual server 'http://myserver:8100/' using existing AppPool 'MSSharePointPortalAppPool'...
22:41:33 Failed to create portal successfully MY Portal

UPDATE: Travis advised that I should have removed WSS before starting the SPS installation but this document clearlystates that during SPS installation "your virtual servers for WSSare automatically disconnected" it does not at any point indicate thatyou should first uninstall WSS completely. This is a valid pointbut not the source of the problems in this case.

UPDATE 2: Having completely removed SPS and WSS andrestored our production sites from backups I have had more time now toinspect the server event logs.

It seems that at the stage when I was asked to configure thecomponent assignments web/search/index/ (SPS Central Administration |Configure Server Topology), there are 'Information' messages in theevent log (surely these should be warnings or errors?!) relating toerrors with various SharePoint-related services (search service, alertservice etc)

e.g. "..description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( SharePoint Portal Alert Service ) cannot be found."

So there is no way to find out what the errors are, but in any caseit seems a whole slew of services failed to get installed properly.What annoys me no end is that the 'Configure Server Topology' pagegives you no indication that anything has gone wrong.

The reason I assume that these services failed to getinstalled is that immediately preceding these cryptic errors thereare more specific errors as follows: 

"The configuration information of the performance library"C:\WINDOWS\system32\infoctrs.dll" for the "InetInfo" service does notmatch the trusted performance library information stored in theregistry" and there was a similar one relating to W3SVC

then one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to process the SharePoint Portal AlertsNotification Service performance library since one of the data blobsreported to have classes but had zero size"

and one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to retrieve data from the PerfLib subkey:SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SPSARPI\Performance\Library, errorcode: 0x80041009"

the same error was also logged for SPSAUTOCAT, SPSGATHERER, SPSGTHRSVC, SPSINDEX, SPSMATRIXPI, SPSSEARCH, SSO, subpi.

Then there was this (reported under the identity of the app pool service account being used for SPS/WSS):

"Windows cannot unload your classes registry file - it is still inuse by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded whenit is no longer in use."

and

"Windows saved user MyDomain\svcSharePoint registry while anapplication or service was still using the registry during log off. Thememory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registrywill be unloaded when it is no longer in use. This is often caused byservices running as a user account, try configuring the services to runin either the LocalService or NetworkService account."

and then

"The worker process failed to initialize the http.sys communicationor the w3svc communication layer and therefore could not be started.The data field contains the error number."

If anyone know why all this could have occurred I'd be interested tohear. In the meantime I'm probably going to call TechNet direct.

UPDATE 3: We had numerous issues with DNS andKerberos authentication on our domain about which we raised a PSS callto Microsoft who dealt with the issue very efficiently. After alsoreinstalling W2K3 from scratch I then didnt have any problemsinstalling SPS, thanks to everyone who replied with comments.

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#1 Maxim V. Karpov on 2.25.2005 at 11:35 AM

What I ran into before was if you extend virtual server with WSS on IIS WebSite it uses the port of IIS and stores the information inside the registry. So, I delete registry that corresponds to IIS port id to WSS GUID.<br><br>I hope this helps, Maxim<br><br>[www.ipattern.com do you?]<br>

#2 Travis Illig on 2.25.2005 at 11:35 AM

You can't install SPS *over* WSS.If you have WSS installed on a server and you want SPS installed, you need to first UNINSTALL WSS, then install SPS.As part of the SPS installation, WSS will be reinstalled.While SPS is a superset of WSS, it can be considered a standalone product; it is entirely integrated with WSS, not an &quot;add-on.&quot;<br><br>Assuming you got past that, also can't put a portal on a virtual server that is already extended with WSS.Remove WSS from the virtual server and THEN put the portal on there.<br><br>If neither of those are the case, well... good luck. ;)

#3 Rohan Cragg on 2.25.2005 at 11:35 AM

Thanks for the comments guys but I dont think these address the problem as I explain in my update.

#4 Travis Illig on 2.25.2005 at 11:35 AM

Actually, your update says exactly what my comment said - uninstall WSS first, then install SPS.:)Hope that worked for you.I ran into this exact thing myself the first time I tried installing SPS, back in beta 1 days.

#5 Juan Trevino on 2.25.2005 at 11:35 AM

Not sure if this is the problem, a coincidence, or just an omission, but I think I found an error in your post:<br>&quot;The app pool identity has the required privileges on the remote SQL server (database creators role) and local admin rights on the IIS server.&quot;<br><br>I believe you actually also need to have Security Admin rights on the SQL server. I know you do in WSS, but I am not positive in SPS.<br><br>Good luck.<br>

#6 holdaweb on 2.25.2005 at 11:35 AM

Hi,<br><br>I don't know if this helps, but I have seen a similar problem when building SPS servers.<br>Sometimes (but not every time), I attempt to create the first Portal on the server and it fails;<br>The logs report problems with the SharePoint Alerts Service;<br>I have found that changing the UserID running the SharePoint Alerts Service to the System Account give me a work-around to this.<br>

#7 Rohan Cragg on 2.25.2005 at 11:35 AM

Thanks everyone for your replies.<br><br>I did indeed have event log errors relating to the setup of the Alert Service (and some other components). Sadly the SPS installation UI does not give you any warning of this.<br><br>We seem to have some more general AD replication problems on our domain and this seems to have had a knock-on effect on authentication generally, so I'll not be installing SPS until all this is resolved.