MOSS/WSS basics of debugging errors

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This blog is dedicated to troubleshooting MOSS/WSS errors. I will keep adding to this periodically.

 

1. The first and foremost is of course the Application log in Windows Event Viewer.

2. Next check for the ULS log; this is located under the ……/12/logs folder. It is not always that you get a horde of information here, but then there are time when the information in the log points you to the resolution. You can increase/decrease the level of reporting by changing setting in Central Admin | Operations | Logging and reporting.

3. Another important log is the upgrade.log located under the ……/12/logs folder. This file is very useful when it comes to troubleshooting issue related to upgrades (including patch updates, Service Packs.) Please note here that the message you will normally see on un-successful completion of PSConfig is “Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed.  Configuration must be performed before you use SharePoint Products and Technologies.  For further details, see the diagnostic log located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\PSCDiagnostics_x_xx_xxxx_xx_xx_xx_xxx_xxxxxxxxxx.log and the application event log.” However this log does not have a lot of information.

4. A very common error is “An unexpected error has occurred”. Of course this is very generic and does not give any clues to the actual error. To top it you may also not see any errors written to the log files or trace logs.

Changing the entry in web.config as follows can throw some light on this error.

<SafeMode MaxControls=“200“ CallStack=“false“… to <SafeMode MaxControls=“200“ CallStack=“true“… and the entry <customErrors mode=“Off“/> (by default this is on) will give a standard AP.Net  error page with the stack trace.

5. Another common error that I have observed is “The schema version (X.X.XXX.X) of the database spscontentdb on SQLMOSSServer(name of the sql server) is not consistent with the expected database schema version (Y.Y.YYY.Y) on MOSSserver(name).  Connections to this database from this server have been blocked to avoid data loss.  Upgrade the web front end or the content database to ensure that these versions match. ”

For every similar entry that you observe in the application log in Event Viewer, you can cross verify this by looking into the versions table of the respective DB. Of course we all know that directly modifying the database puts the SharePoint installation into an unsupported manner(https://support.microsoft.com/kb/841057/en-us). So what’s the alternative; use the command “psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait –force” which will re-synchronize the schema versions. If you still observe errors check the upgrade log further.

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