User Profile Service — Stuck on Stopping

You will be lucky if User Profile worked with you for the first time ! yaa we all know this.

We also know it stuck sometimes or always anyway on Starting … but for me was stucking on Stopping 🙂 it happens.

After searching I found this thread which helped me http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-GB/sharepoint2010setup/thread/6d1b123a-391b-4e9e-946d-c23027192e62

Steps:
1. stsadm -o enumservices > c:\services.txt – Those gave me a list of services and showed me what the name of the service I need to stop is.
2. stsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype “Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ProfileSynchronizationService, Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c” -servicename FIMSynchronizationService
The second command stopped the service.

Good Luck.

SharePoint 2010 Installation Error ! in Step 9

I ran into this installation error for more then 4 hours ! I tried lots of stuff to make it & searched a lot till I found this article http://www.mattgrovesblog.com/2009/11/sp2010-installation-error.html#axzz1ssEbtjSV

so the exception I was getting was in step 9 is this;

“An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException was thrown.  Additional exception information: An error has occurred while validating the configuration settings.  An exception of type System.ArgumentNullException was thrown.  Additional exception information: The errorData argument cannot be null or zero length.“

After some diagnosis found this was due to the Windows firewall blocking PSConfig from talking to remote hosts!

So, what the error should say is:

Due to the Windows Firewall being enabled the PSConfig cannot create a connection to remote hosts (eg. your SQL server!!). Please allow PSConfig out through the firewall!

Having now created the firewall rule I am making progress!

Of course, some will simply disable Windows Firewall 😉