UPDATE: After trying several different calls to MS and being told by some that my only option was to upgrade to the Feb 2011 CU for MOSS, I finally got in touch with someone who was able to give me the CU I needed. According to MS, the CU was pulled due to an issue with Project Server. They seemed to indicate to me that it will be available again at some point, but with no concrete date for when that will be. So my advice, call and be persistent and try to get someone to send you a copy.
This issue has caused me quite a lot of grief and at the time of writing this post, is yet to be resolved.
Thanks to all who attempted to help out by providing links to the CU, I’m going to outline in this post what the issue is and why those links don’t work. Hopefully someone else can make use of this and get past where we are now.
I have a current production farm whose patch level is the MOSS August 2010 CU, or 12.0.0.6545. Let’s say I need to add a new server to this farm. If I download the SharePoint Server software for MOSS from the MS site and install it, I’ll end up with 12.0.0.6421, which is SP2. Makes sense. Downloads from MS should be at the SP level, and you apply the cumulative updates as required.
In our case, we required that we patch to August 2010 CU, so that we could run the configuration wizard on this server and add it to the farm. For those of you who don’t know, if the patch level of the server you are adding to the farm is DIFFERENT from the farm itself, the config wizard will fail with an access is denied error in the upgrade log file. So getting the right patch level is important.
Now let’s review what’s currently published on this site: http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2010/09/02/august-2010-cumulative-update-for-sharepoint-has-been-released.aspx.
Stefan kindly lists all of the CU information for the August 2010 update. Please note I’m not talking about SharePoint 2010 here, but rather the August 2010 CU for MOSS 2007. Anyways, let’s try the following two links from Stefan’s site:
WSS: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbln=en-us&kbnum=2276474
MOSS: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbln=en-us&kbnum=2276472
You will notice that the WSS link has a hotfix available for download, whereas the MOSS link gives you:
The KB article has no public hotfixes. Please contact support if you need immediate assistance.
This means the CU has been pulled. Several phone calls with MS have occurred and I’ve received confirmation from them that the August 2010 CU for MOSS has been pulled due to an issue that affects Project Server. How frustrating! I get that they’ve pulled it, but what about those customers not using Project Server in need of this CU?
It’s been suggested by others and MS that we upgrade the farm to the Feb 2011 MOSS CU. I understand that this is an option, but it’s really not. This will take us days worth of effort to test, plan and upgrade a QA, Staging, Production and Dev environment.
I have noticed that the individual updates that make up this CU are available for download, but I would feel much better patching this server to the exact same configuration as the others. I’m not confident that what’s available now is not different from what’s been pulled.
That’s it, that’s all I have for now, I will update this post as soon as I hear back from MS. They are attempting to get the CU for us in a back channel sort of way. Anyone who has additional information, I’d be happy to post.
Lesson Learned:
WHEN DOING AN INSTALLATION OF A PRODUCTION SHAREPOINT ENVIRONMENT, KEEP THE INSTALLATION FILES SOMEWHERE DOCUMENTED AND ACCESSIBLE SHOULD THEY BE PULLED IN THE FUTURE.
In Rails, we have a concept called Freeze Gems that’s similar to this idea:
Freezing Rails is recommended if you are using a Rails application for a business site or another production environment where stability is the most important concern. If you don’t freeze your application, there is a small possibility that your application might stop working due to compatibility problems when a new version of Rails is installed on our servers.
Reference: http://support.tigertech.net/freeze-rails