Back in June, Microsoft released a Sharepoint security update (MS10-039) which reportedly resolved an issue which allowed security privileges to be increased. At the time, I hadn’t deployed the update to our TFS server because we were in the midst of some big project work, and I didn’t want to disrupt the server. Last week, I finally got around to playing patch catchup, and deployed this patch. It didn’t go as smoothly as one would hope…
After the patches were pushed, server rebooted, I thought everything was good. Turns out, not so much, as the following morning, I received multiple reports that the documents section, and SharePoint portal was not working on the TFS server. A quick look on the server showed that the front end web services kept stopping, and throwing a weird error…
The schema version (#.#.#.#) of the database SharePoint_AdminContent_#### on Databaseservername is not consistent with the expected database schema version (#.#.##.#) on SharePointServername. 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.
That’s baffling, I didn’t upgrade the database. It took me a minute to realize that the version numbers were switched, the web site was requesting a higher version than the database provided. A quick check, and of course, the security update was towards the front end. This meant that somewhere in the security update, the web front end now wanted a newer DB version.
Fortunately this is really easy to fix. If you have multiple front ends for your SharePoint server, make sure they are all running the same patches, if not, you’ll have issues. Once you’ve done that, on one of the front ends, re-run the SharePoint configuration wizard (under Administrative tools). You don’t have to change any options, simply “next” your way through all the options, as it’ll re-load all your previous settings. Once it goes through the wizard, and reaches the final step, it’ll then go and upgrade the database for you.
After that, it should restart all the services, and SharePoint should start working for you again. This is probably documented somewhere on the Microsoft site, but would certainly be handy if it was a little more obvious as part of the patching process.