One of the beauty of working in corporate environments is all this hue and cry about maintaining different environments DEV, QA, PROD and if you are lucky SandBox also. Though I agree all of them are necessary and when PROD being down can cost dollars and may be your job, they are must. But that put us geek fellows in doing the same stuff over and over on different environment. Doesn't that become boring? But hey sometimes when you get upgraders like SP5 to SP6 suddenly there are all sorts of charms in life. So one fine day I started our upgrade from EP5 SP5 Patch 3 HFx (x coz I am too lazy to check what was the last HF I applied) to EP 5 SP6. I went thru all the notes especially the Central Note for Upgrading SP5 to SP6 Note 649756. You have to pay close attention to the related notes. The most pesky one is 653403. As it expects you to have irj.ear, irj_deploy.xml, temp.ear from a SP6 installation. While first files are there in the SP6 CD. 3rd file i.e. temp.ear is created I guess when you deploy irj.ear. Typical "Chicken and Egg" problem. But OSS guys or Service Channel guys were good enough to loan us their temp.ear.
With this correct "stuff" in hand I marched ahead and launched the setup.exe. But you know Murphy still lives and I suspect is always lingering somewhere around me. The Requirement Verification tool that was supposed to be my friend turned out to be a foe. This tool was expecting me to be on EP5 SP5 Patch 1 but I was on Patch 3, so the upgrade was failing. But sometimes geeks have their ways. I figured out that Requirement tool was working out of *.req files in the "Requirements Verification Tool" directory. I looked at the internals of file specific to our environment i.e. SP5 MSSQL to SP 6 MSSQL and found that the operator check for upgrade was
GO AHEAD ifPortal Install Value EqualSP5 Patch 1
I changed the EQUAL operator to Greater or Equal. And Installer started working. From here the road to SP6 was slightly better. Note 685425 and Note 693218 were definitely helpful and much appreciated. Finally portal was upgraded to SP6 every one was happy and future seemed bright. Wait what you said seemed bright you mean there was some trouble.
Oh yes. You see following the good ol' best practices I did all this on Sandbox environment. Where there was not much real content. But this upgrade did boost my morale to move on to DEV environment. This time the upgrade took only an hour compared to days of work on the Sandbox. Finally I was chomping some roles in the role editor in PCD editor and I found there was some messy stuff with the scroll bars in PCD. They won't show up. I was moving from one field to another using the powerful button called "Tab". Then I noticed that if I select some text on the RHS of PCD editor I can see the scroll bars. So somewhere some CSS was mucked up. Cool that is a clue. I went ahead and looked at our style. As any good portal guy would have it, I had quite a few of our own Themes. So I upgraded all of them. And to my delight Role/PCD editor started show up the way I would have liked it.
You might be wondering by now, dude why this big blog about SP6 upgrade when world is moving EP6. Then my fellow blogger(in the same sense as fellow traveler) this is to help some lost soul who might have to do this. And who knows there might be one out there 😄
Cheers
This is to reading at SDN kid
