A while back Service Pack 2 for SharePoint was released. That’s all good. But unfortunately you might run into some snags installing it. This post is an attempt at doing a write-up of the issues I’ve seen on blogs, in support kb’s and that myself and my colleagues at Microsoft Services Sweden have encountered, being out there in the field close to the metal. I’ll come back and update the list if necessary.

Before we get to the lists, be sure to do your homework. Read:

• Deploy upgrade instructions for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0
• Check out Stefan Gossner’s blog post for links to fix-lists and more

Here we go:

Use the right accounts

This is a simple one, just read the docs (link above) and make sure the account running SP2 has permissions such as db_owner on the databases. I ran into this when we tried to rush the installations, which of course resulted in rollback and we had to do it all over again.

Product Key issues

This one you probably heard about, it has made its way trough the blogosphere big time. Seems the installer sets the trail period to 180 days for MOSS servers when installing SP2. This does not affect WSS! A hotfix in the works, and a workaround is available.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

UPDATE 2009-06-29: Product group issued fixes for this, read more at: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/06/25/service-pack-2-update.aspx

Disappearing host file

It looks like MOSS Search drops the hosts file and recreates it. So if the Service Account is not in the Admin group, it does not have the right to create it.

• http://edinkapic.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-first-moss-2007-sp2-upgrade.html
• http://blogs.msdn.com/jjameson/archive/2007/05/05/the-case-of-the-disappearing-hosts-file.aspx

No SharePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 2 .msp files are installed if you have the Stswwsp1.msp file in the Updates folder

• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;968283&sd=rss&spid=11373

The Area Service Web service is removed from SharePoint Server 2007 after you install the 2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2

• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;970358&sd=rss&spid=11373

Changes web.config

We’ve seen in some cases that the SP2 installation changes the web.config on the server where Central Admin is hosted. This was also the server which ran the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard during the Service Pack install.

The problem was that SP2 added a second defaultProxy-tag. The duplication of the defaulProxy-tag lead to failures loading the ASP.Net ISAPI filter.

Could not find load balancer service

After a Service Pack 2 install one of my colleagues encountered the error “Could not find load balancer service.” in the Event Log. SP2 cleared the LoadBalancerURL and Port values in the registry. This only happened on the MOSS server with Central Admin. This was also the server on which ran the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard as a part of the Service Pack installation.

Update 2009-08-17:

Two other issues I’ve seen folks stumble across:

SharePoint SP2: “The B2B upgrader timer job failed.”

https://blogs.catapultsystems.com/matthew/archive/2009/08/01/sharepoint-sp2-“the-b2b-upgrader-timer-job-failed-”.aspx

MOSS and WSS SP2 can break PDF searching

https://sharepointsearch.com/cs/blogs/notorioustech/archive/2009/07/28/moss-and-wss-sp2-can-break-pdf-searching.aspx