restore blocked

Question

Hi all

I have a serious problem with a farm of a customer.
The customer requested to restore an SSP from production enviroment to test enviroment. In test enviroment an identical SSP was already present. Customer requested to overwrite it.
Using the GUI I started a restore job, using the backup of the night done with a scheduled stsadm script that save all the SSP of the farm. The restore run for a while, at a certain point it gave this error:

Object SSP_NAME failed in event OnRestore. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory. TimeoutException: Timed out waiting for Shared Services provisioning jobs to pause.

after it the restore seem to be freezed up.
I deleted the job in the timer job defition, tryed to restard some services on the machines, like Windows SharePoint Services Search and Windows SharePoint Services Administration.
Anyway when I go in backup and restore status, the job is alaways there.

I succeded to delete the SSP that the job created, that was in unproviding status, but it's all.

Someone could suggest a workaround for this problem?

Farm is 2007 SP1 and is composed by two frontend, one index and one sql 2005 server. Al servers are w2k3 64bit

Answer 1

I never have much luck administrating SSP's through the GUI.  I mostly use STSADM to do anything with the SSP as for some reason I have much better luck.  I would try restoring your SSP via STSADM and see if you get back the same error.  Below is the Stsadm syntax for this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262163.aspx

HTH

Cheers,

Jason Medero

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Jason Medero, WSS MVP, B&R Business Solutions, www.sharepointblogs.com/jasonmedero