Sharepoint 2010 SP2 installation - variety of issues

Thu, Sep 13, 2018 3-minute read

I know. Sharepoint 2010. It’s not even. I mean. Just.

Look let’s skip past any discussion about why this is happening in 2018, and just cover the issues, OK?

So. You’re installing SP2 on a Sharepoint 2010 Farm. This may well apply to any CU in fact. And it possibly applies to SP2013+ also - but at least one of these issues is allegedly caused by a CU that was rolled up in SP2.

Right, that’s enough foreplay.

You may encounter two issues:

  1. Upgrade/ installation fails, because you can’t start the SPAdminV4 service.

This is possibly caused by CU2677070 which requires certificate checking. But if your environments don’t have internet access, then it will sit there trying, and then fail. You can resolve this through editing computer group policy.

Run > gpedit.msc
In Computer Configuration you’re looking for public key policies. This will vary based on which version of Windows Server you’re running, but in the case of 2008R2 (I know! See above. OK?) it’s in Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Public Key Policies.
In PKP, find ‘Certificate Path Validation Settings’ and open it.
Select the ‘Network Retrieval’ tab
Click ‘Define these policy settings’ and then deselect ‘Automatically update certificates’
Click Apply, OK, then restart the machine.

  1. Upgrade/ installation still fails, because you can’t start the SPAdminV4 service.

The above may be enough for you, but if it not, also try this. You may get an error like ‘Cannot start service SPAdminv4 on computer ‘.” (in upgrade / diagnostics logs created by PSConfig.)

The way that resolved this for me was:

Navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN
In here, create a file called WSSADMIN.EXE.CONFIG. *Make sure it has a .config extension and not a .txt extension. Windows will do this if you have the ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ option in Control Panel selected.
Open the file and populate with

<configuration>
<runtime>
<generatepublisherevidence enabled="false"></generatepublisherevidence>
</runtime>
</configuration>

Ensure if you copy paste the above the ” copy across to your text file correctly. If in doubt, retype it manually. If you get a SideBySide error due to manifest issues, you need to do this.

Save the file then try to start the Sharepoint Admin service. Should now work OK and hopefully your PSConfig upgrade session will complete successfully.

One other thing, whilst I’m here, my upgrade session failed for a few other reasons which were easy to fix (and would be useful things to check before starting the upgrade.)

  1. The upgrade sequence couldn’t drop triggers on the Social DB due to lack of access. I’m not entirely sure why it had no permissions. I granted the CA service account db_owner on the social database and it worked OK.
  2. There were broken feature definitions in the Farm. These could have been caused by myriad things over the years. You can pick through them using Powershell and try and determine what should be there and shouldn’t… but a better way is to use FeatureAdmin. This helpfully lists everything in your farm and helps you track down - and optionally remove - dodgy features. It is a bit brute force so use it with caution. Further note on this: for me, 2.4.6 worked better than 2.4.8.

Hope this helps.