Getting a strange situation last view weeks. I needed to restore the SSP within a new farm.
The old farm was installed in following situation:
a) MOSS2007
b) SP1
c) Build 12.0.0.6305.5000
d) Build 12.0.0.6317.5000
All patches was applied without slipstreaming.
When I started to create my slipstream CD I applied all patches at once. During the test (nothing was installed slipstreamed) eveything works great. Restore of the SSP was really easy. No problem.
Because of above experience It was possible to go relaxed in mainanance time. When I started to restore the SSP a strange error occured. Ok. Uninstall everything Slipstream new. Restore again. I tried that in different situations. Nothing worked. At 2:00 AM the mirror was going back into the server. Believe me. A really frustrating situation.
Two weeks figuring out which error occured camed a strange result! Slipstreaming does not work. If everything is installed manually (see above) the restore works great. If you use a slipstreaming MOSS 2007 CD the restore will fail. A colleague of mine made 8 different tests. Last friday it was possible to restore everything successfully. But not slipstreamed.
Today I give that error to Microsoft. Understand. If slipstreaming is not working what bring us the future? Not all customers make good documentation. As well. What for a f… work.
Resume: Right now if you get following error
Reason: The specified SearchSharedDatabase Name=SharePoint_SSP_Search_DB=SPDatabaseServiceInstance has been upgraded to a newer version of SharePoint. Please upgrade this SharePoint application server before attempting to access this object.
Check the event log for details.
Note: SSP provisioning will be retried periodically. If you correct the error that caused this failure, provisining will subsequently succeed. To stop provisioning from being retired, delete the SSP.
…and you used slipstreaming install everything manually. That should work!
Hint: You get above error as well if you patch your target machine one patch level higher! I tried this with the latest patch Build 12.0.0.6318.5000. So this will not help you. The problem is that above message is just confusing and not the reallity.
Timo