Blank Site Template (and other problems)

[joshlarson]

I orginally posted this on microsoft.public.project.pro_and_server, but
from what I understand that newsgroup is shutting down.

Project Server 2003 has been running smoothly since I installed it six
months ago, but I recently started running into problems (which all
started occurring at the same time). I've found a bunch of posts about
the blank site template problem on this newsgroup, but I haven't been
able to find a post that had a resolution.

Here are the problems that have popped up recently:
1. When I go to Admin->Manange Windows SharePoint Services->Site
Provisioning Settings, the Site Template drop-down is blank. I have
uploaded custom site templates in the past and have been able to choose
them using this drop-down.

2. When I create a new project and try to access the project workspace,
I get the following error:
The SharePoint site for this project has not been created.
Publish a project to Project Server or contact your administrator.

I can access all of the existing project workspaces without any
problems.

3. When I try to manually create the SharePoint site using the Create
Site option on the Admin->Manange Windows SharePoint Services->Manage
SharePoint Sites page, I get the following error:
Error occurred when creating site. Site does not seem to exist.

4. The Risks and Issues lists are not displaying on the Project Web
Access home page. The following error is displayed:
There is a problem establishing a connection with the Web server
running Windows SharePoint Services. Contact your system administrator.

I have Project Server 2003 installed on its own server, with the WSS
and Project Server databases installed on a separate server with SQL
Server 2000.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Josh

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Josh:

Can you verify that the account you used for Com+ identity for WSS is not
disabled or password expired?

 

[joshlarson]

Gary,

Is there a way to tell which account I'm using for Com+ identity? This
isn't something that I remember setting up when doing the install.

Thanks,
Josh

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Josh:

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Component Services
Expand Computers to My Computers and locate COM+
Right click on the Project Server WSS component and select the identity tab

Did you use your own identity? This is a common cheat that causes the system
to crash the next time your password changes.

 

[joshlarson]

Gary,

I had used a local account that is part of the Administrators group,
and set the password to never expire.

To ensure that this setting isn't causing the problems, I temporarily
changed it to use one of our network admin accounts that has admin
access to all of our servers. Unfortunately, this didn't fix the
problem.

Thanks for the suggestion, and I would appreciate any more you might
have.

Josh

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Josh:

Read this fellow's experience:

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...7a5b8?lnk=st&q=&rnum=1&hl=en#32c9be9809c7a5b8

I don't think you need to complete all the gyrations this guy went through
to restore his top-level site, but you might. It would be good to know what
the genesis of the problem might be as that might lead to an easier fix.

 

[joshlarson]

Thanks for all of your help Gary. I'm going to save Eludovic's
solution as a last resort. I'm working with Microsoft on resolving
this, and I'll report back what I find.

Thanks,
Josh

 

[joshlarson]

Hi Gary,

I worked with Microsoft and they came up with the following solution,
which took care of all four of my problems.

1) Rerun proxycfg

proxycfg -d -p
"http://servername;https://servername;http://servername.company.com;https://servername.company.com"
"<local>;servername;servername.company.com"

2) Rerun PSComPlus to ensure credentials are correct.

3) Go into PWA --> Admin --> Manage Windows SharePoint Services. Test
the links and then Save.

In my case I wasn't actually using a proxy server, so I just
substituted my Project server name for "servername", and my company
name for "company" in step #1.

They also pointed me to the following KB article which didn't apply to
my situation, but which you might find interesting:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/910345/en-us

Thanks again for your help.

Josh