Applying Content Deployment rollup fixes 952698 and 952704

Just a quick post to make up for a quiet month. I've been on holiday, hence the lack of new posts.

Just installed the Content Deployment rollup fixes to one of my environments. They contain some 60+ fixes, and seem like a good supplement to the lovely stability that SP1 gave MOSS Variations. At time of writing they are available by request from Microsoft. The fixes are;

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704

The first is WSS, the second MOSS, and all Language Pack SP1 fixes need to have been applied already.

The install didn't go 100% smoothly, which is why I'm posting here. After installing the WSS patch 952698 and running Sharepoint Configuration Wizard, the wizard failed on step 8 with an error that boiled down to "An exception was encountered when trying to start service SPAdmin". Sure enough even manually trying to start SPAdmin service wouldn't work. Eek!!

I didn't find any blog posts about this particular fix, but I found others where SPAdmin had failed to start. As a result I first tried this;

On the machine where psconfig failed to start the SPAdmin service run:
%commonprogramfiles%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN\psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force

That didn't work. It complained about cmd being invalid.

Next I tried;

stsadm -o upgrade -inplace -forceupgrade

That did run successfully, but it wasn't enough to get the service started.

Finally it was regedit time;

Modify the service timeout values in the Registry:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control add/modify DWORD value ServicesPipeTimeout to 60000 (60 seconds)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control add/modify STRING value WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 120000 (120 seconds)

After doing the regedit and restarting the server everything worked. I went on to install the MOSS patch 952704 without any issues.

Preliminary testing indicates the server is fine. Too soon to say that I won't be finding any Variation issues alas. I've already found a legacy broken page link, which isn't fixed by hotfixes. I'll write about that one soon, as it's particular fix is undocumented according to google search!

Fingers crossed that my Variations installations are gaining the stability that everyone wants.