SharePoint Soup

Author: Jane

  • Adding a Column to a Document Library in SP 2016 – SharePoint Basics

    New video posted for our SharePoint Basics series. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/KIm2nM5Xl2A

  • Psconfig fails – Failed to provision the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application

    Recently when applying SharePoint patches (SharePoint 2016 – Dec 2020 Patches) and attempting to run the Products and Configuration wizard (GUI), it failed with the following error:

    Failed to provision the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application.

    This is a critical task. You have to fix the failures before you can continue.

    An exception of type System.ArgumentException was thrown.  Additional exception information: The IncomingUrl is already present in the collection in a different zone.  A url may only map to one zone at a time.  Use a different url for requests from this zone.

    The Problem

    I was confused and still don’t know what originally caused it. I recently did a database restore but it was not a central admin database, it was for a different web application. When I was running through the GUI the second time, I noticed the Central admin URL was wrong.

    Central Admin URL shows as: http://servername:443/

    We have a hostheader set for central admin using port 443 (https) but it was not showing. I checked IIS and the binding was missing (what?!). I have no idea how that happened. I added it back in and Central Admin worked for a bit so I could check the alternate access mappings. It was correct. I tried to run the GUI PSConfig again and it was still mismatched with the wrong URL and failed with the same error.

    Next, I tried to run PSCONFIG.exe via powershell using:

    PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

    It successfully completed but when I tried running central admin, it didn’t work. I got a 404 error. I checked the GUI again and it was showing the wrong URL again for central admin.

    The Fix

    What I decided to do was to run the GUI and remove central admin from this server (it’s the only server that was running central admin). It completed successfully but of course, I had no way to load central admin. I ran it again through the GUI and added central admin back using the hostheader. This fixed it. Yay! Central admin is working perfectly and PSCONFIG (GUI) completes successfully. I hope this saves someone some time. 🙂

  • Adding, Editing and Deleting a document from a Document Library

    We posted another SharePoint Basics video. Adding, editing and deleting a document from a document library. Click here to view it. If you have any requests for a how-to/walkthrough, please comment or contact us on our contact form. Thanks!