This was just freaky. I just finished doing a Project Server 2003 installation in Dallas. It went pretty well until I was about to leave. I had been testing and doing some early configuration of the system and everything was working great, including WSS. But today at 11am it stopped working. It was throwing tons of errors in the event log about how it could not connect to the database server PROJSVR01. I could open the admin page for WSS but could not edit any settings. It said that it could not find the database!
Now we had done NOTHING to the server. At all! It worked for 2.5 days and suddenly nothing! Really! I swear!
Then after like the 400th time reading these error messages the IT guy notices that PROJSVR01 is NOT the name of the server where the database is located. The name of the server is PRJSVR01 (PRJ not PROJ). Sure enough I look on the one page in the WSS admin page I can edit and sure enough the wrong name is there. It has PROJSVR01. The really freaky part is that nobody edited this value. It took me 10 mins to remember where the hell it was and the IT guy REALLY did not know where this setting was! And it had been working just fine for 2.5 days! Any thoughts before I give it away?
I had mistakenly entered the name of the server wrong when I extended the virtual server. But how is that possible you ask? Doesn't that page validate the server name and then even try to connect to that server with the username and password you supply? Yes and it worked just fine and that is why the system worked for 2.5 days. WSS was accessing the server just fine with PROJSVR01 and Project Server was accessing it with PRJSVR01!
Here is the really cool part. About a week before I got there the IT department built the server. It's name was PROJSVR01 (notice PROJ). Then they changed the name to PRJSVR01. The reason that everything worked was that the WINS and DNS servers on their network still had entries for the OLD name. I just happened to mistype the server name in that page in WSS so that it equaled the name that the server USED to be named. At 11am today the entries in WINS and DNS got deleted and the path WSS was using to get to the database was gone so it stopped working!
The bad news was that to fix it I had to "UN-Extend" the virtual server, extend it again and then run the Project Server WSS Wizard again. At least it worked!
I thought I had seen some odd issues but this was the more interesting.
Nice story.
(and especially nice that you have the guts to tell it!)
Posted by: Mike Walsh Helsinki | Sunday, February 22, 2004 at 10:33 AM