SharePoint 2013 CU August 2013 – “Internet Information Services not installed”

Today it was time to update my SharePoint 2013 installation from March PU 2013 to August 2013 CU - mostly because the Search Schema changed under the hood and I wanted to try something out for the awesome Search Query Tool.

Download

Wow, 1.8GB patch – that is huge! Compared to the RTM version of SharePoint 2013 with 2.4GB they rewrote 75% - or the patching strategy is not that optimal.

Its time for a new baseline so patches can be smaller again. Lets see what happens after the SPC.

You can grab the SharePoint 2013 CU August 2013 patch here: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2817616&kbln=en-us

KB Details here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817616

Patch notes of Todd Klindt (my inofficial SharePoint patch guru) are here (and no regression reported): http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Regressions/SP2013Aug13.aspx

Patching

For the patching part I always take the script from the article

“Why SharePoint 2013 Cumulative Update takes 5 hours to install?” – if you have not read it, go for it. This time something went bad, maybe because I started the script from ISE or something like that – it could not start the patch process so I did it myself. Took around 30 Minutes on my DEV VM – reboot and we should be ready, right?

“Internet Information Service not installed”

After the patching you have to start the Config Wizard. I was a little surprised as it responds with a nice error –  I even tried the PowerShell command in case there is a difference, but no:

What? IIS not installed anymore? Something must be broken with the Patch – let’s blame Todd for it:

I patch my SharePoint 2013 to August CU - if that does not work I blame @ToddKlindt 🙂

— Maximilian Melcher (@maxmelcher) February 21, 2014

But then I tried to reproduce my steps – of course it must be an user error. After reading the patch script (reading things sometimes helps), I noticed that the script disables the IIS Admin service…

SharePoint does not like that – set it back to Automatic start and start the service.

Starting the site is a good idea, too:

And then start the config wizard again:

And wait until every database is updated:

Search “Paused for:External request”

Then I tried do do a Search – without a success. I went to the Search Service Application page and saw the status: “Paused for:External request” – that means something paused the Service Application (maybe, just maybe someone tried to patch):

and we should resume it – 3 lines of PowerShell:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
$ssa | Resume-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication

Lessons learned

Patching can be tough – but when you protocol what you do or can at least reproduce what you have done its pretty much straight forward. I do not blame the patch script here, I obviously did something wrong – but the error message is really misleading isn’t it?