SharePoint 2013 Service Pack 1 Withdrawn

Microsoft has withdrawn Service Pack 1 from general public availability as it will block or won't allow future public or cumulative updates  from installing. There are no other issues reported as per the notes. They are going to release a new version of Service Pack in future no timeline defined for this yet.

There are no clear notes about how to roll back for clients who have already implemented it on their farms.

The download links are broken.

A call with MS Support team may guide them on next steps stay tuned.

Service Pack 1 Update on 08/04/2014:  Checked with  Microsoft's Technical Account Manager and subsequently a call with Suppor Team. "Guidance is not to rollback as the existing Service Pack 1 won't affect anything apart from stopping future upgrades. Once the re-released version of Service Pack 1 / hotfix is available , customers can install it. There is no ETA on the release date" .


"We have recently uncovered an issue with this Service Pack 1 package that may prevent customers who have Service Pack 1 from deploying future public or cumulative updates. As a precautionary measure, we have deactivated the download page until a new package is published. "

Links: 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817429/en-gb

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2014/02/25/announcing-the-release-of-service-pack-1-for-office-2013-and-sharepoint-2013.aspx

Service Pack 1 Update: Microsoft has re-released a newer version of the service pack with the fix i.e. to allow installing future CU's. The challenge we had was to re-install newer version of service pack 1 on all of our SharePoint Farms which comprises of 40 plus servers. I would have expected Microsoft to release a hot-fix for customers who have already installed Service Pack instead of going for a full blown deployment of Service Pack. This caused enormous time to coordinate the deployment of service pack going through CAB, deployment etc.

SharePoint 2013 Service Pack 1 Fails

Rolled out Service Packs on  6 DEV Servers , Shared Services UAT farm all went well apart from couple of niggling issues like the following but overall it was successful:

Search Host Controller Service stuck in Starting State
User Profile Sync Service stuck in Starting state

Those were pretty straight forward to fix but the killer one appeared on the Pre-Prod environment which connects to Production domain controller. Everything looked good  till we ran Product and Config Wizard I reckon that's where all the Fun starts huh :). Failed at the Last step.

“   Unable to create a Service Connection Point in the current Active Directory domain. Verify that the SharePoint container exists in the current domain and that you have rights to write to it.

Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The object LDAP://CN=Microsoft SharePoint Products,CN=System,DC=emea,DC=cbre,DC=net doesn't exist in the directory.

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServiceConnectionPoint.Ensure(String serviceBindingInformation)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.UpgradeTask.Run() “

The container Microsoft SharePoint Products was missing in ADSI Active Directory Service Interface Editor. 

As it's a Shared Services environment and so many install / farms account and Pre-Prod environment for Shared Services leveraged across Intranet and Extranet farms,  it made sense to create an Active Directory Group called as SharePointFarmAdmins and add all install and farms accounts in it.

Once that was done, our AD guy created the container and granted the required ( write on the container ) permissions to SharePointFarmAdmins group. 

Re-ran the Product Configuration Wizard success. 

There are some specific Power Shell command let's which allows you to Get  and Set the Service Connection Point SCP which you can run from SharePoint 2013 Management Shell. 

To Get: 

Get-SPFarmConfig -ServiceConnectionPoint 

To Set : 

 Set-SPFarmConfig -ServiceConnectionPointBindingInformation StringwithBindingInformation

To create the Microsoft SharePoint Products container in ADSI  ,  follow the instructions from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730261(v=office.14).aspx

The roll out of Service Packs , Cumulative updates , solutions  etc.. to go through a SDLC process etc.... emphasizes the importance of having a Pre-Prod environments which I have seen some organization ignores due to cost related issues or awareness of how it will play a pivotal role.

PS: Make sure WSS Usage DB is not part of Always On Group in case you're using Availability Groups in SQL Server 2012