Question : Installing WSS3 on Small Business Server 2003

Ok,  so i am reading a lot on the web about doing a side by side install rather than an inplace upgrade from wss2.0. No one seems to be able to describe exactly why the inplace upgrade is such a big no no.

From what i have read,  the crux of it is that you loose some integration of SBS and WSS,  and may possibly loose some data.

So, as i don't use any of the services involved, I have decided an inplpace upgrade is fine. I have tested this on my dev and demo servers with no issues.

I have now carried out the upgrade on a production server, and all is fine....until for no apparent reason all IIS services stop working.

Now by stop working i don't mean the service crash, in fact everything is running in the service console, these all restart correctly also.

When i try and open up OWA, Company Web, localhost or any other website on the IIS server i get a page not found error. The only way to fix this seems to be to restart the entire server.

I have checked the event logs, IIS logs, Sharepoint Logs (Debugging turned up to max) and there are no errors.

So two questions....

• Any ideas on what is causing the website to be unavailable, any other debugging i can try ?

• Anyone got a real explanation why an inplace upgrade is such a bad idea ?

Answer : Installing WSS3 on Small Business Server 2003

Ok for anyone that is interested I seem to have discovered the issue. As the application was being developed while it was on the live environment some of the DLL's were compiled in debug mode. This meant that debug code was running when an error was hit on a client machine. More specifically the debug.asserts were being hit, with no dialogue being displayed on the client or server.

This meant that the server was waiting for user interaction, then timing out unrecoverably, even tot he point of requiring a server restart to get the whole thing up and running again.

I will be monitoring the system to ensure that this resolved all of the issues. and report back if anything else comes to light.