Hello There I am writing you because I have tried to upgrade this particular installation of mine from 5.2.3 to 5.6.3 as well as everything in between such as 5.2.3 to 5.3.1 and 5.2.3 to 5.4.4, etc...  Suffice it to say in every case I noted the same stuff and that is their always seemed to be an error upgrading the config file.  The coresitemap provider always failed to install even if I deleted it from the install folder during the upgrade and manaully tried to readd it after the upgrade was finished still it failed.  Lastly when bypassing the 5.4.0 milestone I noted that the telerik editor providers would also fail.

Now another thing that is bizarre about this installation is that I find that unless I am in the integrated pipeline via iis apppool with version 7 or 7.5 I find that it won't start the upgrade engine but rather give me silly errors like object can not be referenced... Than when I do go to integrated pipeline and get the engine started and click on the link to enter my site I run into another error.
The solution this time is to change the apppool pipeline from integrated back to classic.

This has been, among other things the things that have baffled both the admins of dnncreative magazine as well as powerdnn.

If you want to check out all the back and forth talk I had with dnncreative magazine about this topic of mine read my thread on there found at the following link as it will give you in depth details of what I had tried before coming to this point of contacting you guys

http://www.dnncreative.com/Forum/tabid/88/aft/31407/Default.aspx

Any help you could provide on this score would be greatly apprecated.

Bo

 

Thanks,

Bo

I'm assuming that the server is running asp.net 3.5sp1 and that the ms sql server is running a minimum of 2005 sp4 or preferably 2008 sp1.

Firstly there is was a known issue with the sitemap  provider at one point - you can wind up with two versions of the provider in the install folder - which throws an error that can be ignored - basically the new version installs first - then the old version tries to install - and errors because of changes made by the new version.

With regard to telerik - there was a know issue with the telerik provider install crashing because of a locked file handler . . . the resolution to this was to manually upload the telerik web dll to you site via ftp and change a line of the web config to reflect the correct version number.
Do a search of the forums here for telerik upgrade issues.

It is possible that your web.config is also out of sync in some way - I would suggest doing an install of dnn 5.6.3 on a test machine and comparing a copy of the web.config on that test version against your version.

Westa

Hello everyone,

After multiple hours of trying to crack the case of the mysterious upgrading problem I finally hit the issue and was able to get a successful upgrade all the way through to 5.6.3 here is what I discovered.

This problem was multi faceted. What I discovered was that Joe Craig was correct in agreeing that perhaps my iis7 on my local computer was not set up correctly and hence this complicated a resolution.

Now the question is why was it that when I tried to test wether it was my iis7 setup or something else I came to the conclusion it was not my iis7 setup since the same hiccups occured on both my localhost as well as it did on the production server.

Well I discovered it was for the following reason. You see somewhere down the line I don't remember exactly where but somewhere down the line since I moved my installation from ixwebhosting servers and migrated my 2005 to 2008R2 with powerdnn my handlers for iis7 were deleted or missing.

I think this was do to the fact I was having some issues with my dnnnavigational menus after I migrated the site whereby it absolutely wouldn't appear because for some reason it could not find the scriptresource.axd file and hence the javascript postback functionality was failing hence you could not invoke skin objects like login to do any administration work.

Anyway as a result of this issue I believe powerdnn admins in trying to resolve this may have deleted the handlers in my web.config file but I am not 100% sure this happened but what I do know is from the time my menu was fixed to the time I tried to upgrade my site these handlers were gone.

Now back to my development headaches on my localhost. As mentioned earlier in my localhost I was getting these 500.19 duplication errors such as the following:

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Cannot add duplicate collection entry of type 'add' with unique key attribute 'name' set to 'Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource'
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So the way I resolved this was to simply to comment oout the handlers and modules under the system.webserver section of the config file. I will not delve into deep detail about this process here since I discussed it in detail on the dnn creative magazine as well as on an earlier post here.

The bottom line is because I had to comment out system.webserver info on my localhost to get it to work I thought that these handlers must be what was causing the problem somehow and hence the bizarre responses from both my iis7 as well as powerdnn iis7.

It wasn't until I was told how powerdnn troubleshoots upgrade problems via web.config comparisons from release.config and web.config that was being used in the installation. Once I tried this and looked at the differences and saw handlers in the release.config file where as their was none in my web.config file as you know from earlier comments I pasted them in, compared handler with httphandler and came to the conclusion the only difference between the two was one line seen down below

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This made it possible for the sitecoremap provider and the telerik provider to install successfully however I still was having problems with having to have it in integrated mode to upgrade and classic to view.

Once I realized what the two modes really signified as well as the two sections in the config file called system.webserver and system.web I came to the conclusion the issue was really my site up on my local computer.

Though I didn't know the solution to get rid of this particular server error on my local computer (and still don't) I was pretty sure based on my experimentation that for some odd reason the way it is setup on my system makes iis think that it cannot read the system.webserver content and ignore the system.web content hence in a sense my iis7 seems to only function as a iis6.

I know this because if I swapped my test and commented out the httphandlers found in the system.web section and uncommented out the handlers in the system.webserver section I found that I still got that duplication error for sitecoremap, telerik and other handlers and modules by which the system.webserver and system.web had duplciated lines so that the web.config file could be backwards compatible with iis6.

So this told me that my iis7 on my local windows 7 ultimate system could not properly parse or process the system.webserver stuff but could the system.web stuff. This was the case wether the app-pool was set to integrated pipeline or classic it didn't make much difference when it came to this 500.19 error.

I found a bunch of info on this errors but none of what was talked about seemed to effect my issue. For example many including the iis forum spoke on this issue as resulting in a web.config, or machine.config or global.config now known as applicationhost.config having a duplicate entry that the application root web.config had.

Well in my case this was not the case since the default website and application pointed to the very same folder and their was no web.config file in the inetpub/wwwroot since I deleted it. Further more I tested erasing all content in the machine.config and web.config found in the windows/microsoft.net/[asp.net version folder]/config. I tried bout the 2.0 and the 4.0 folder doing this erasing all content and saving business and did not get the duplicate message to disappear.

When I fooled with the applicationhost.config I got some interaction with the iis messages but nothing that fixed the problem. I got the message to disappear and show just a white screen but that was because I had deleted the global module that dealt with showing error messages on the screen so it wasn't that the duplication problem was fixed just that it couldn't be seen.

So I still don't have an answer to this problem but obviously web hosting farms like powerdnn.com got it right and if anyone from these hosting companies or DNN gurus have any ideas of things I could try on my local system to get this duplication errror and be able to truly simulate the production experience on my local computer that would be just great.

Ok so I got off track a bit point is adding those handlers back on (all of them that was suppose to be there in the first place) and deleting the onyaktech modules I had from a couple years ago did the trick. Apparently the onyaktech modules I believe in particular the onyaktech.library module or the onyaktech.nelsonlinks module was the colprit here because when uninstalling the onyaktech.nelsonlinks module I got errors in this process but it uninstalled with warnings.

In the case of the onyaktech.library module it did uninstall without incident as long as I deleted other onyaktech modules on my system frist as the onyaktech.library module is responsible for being the engine for many of onyaktech modules.

Anyway what happened in the case of the onyaktech.library module uninstall is after a "successful" uninstall with no errors when I clicked on return I got this message concerning the fact that my telerik.web.ui.dll file found in the bin folder was missing. It only went missing after I uninstalled this onyaktech.library module. So I simply found a fresh one of these files from the full install folder of the current DNN version I was on and I was back in business.

Anyway I think that the combination of onayktech modules and handlers was the issue here. The reason for such a length of time is for a long time I was focused solley on modules since that is the first think one thinks of when upgrade issues occur as long as it is a stable upgrade so when I widdled down my site to almost nothing in regards to modules I was shocked to find that my woes in regards to failed upgrades or babied upgrades did not resolve. Only after all this did I explore other potential possibilities and after some back and forth with powerdnn concerning my installation and why it wasn't working properly on their servers I got some guidance in a direction I might be able to take this so that I can discover the answer.

Eventually as you can see I did discover the answer as it relates to this upgrade but still baffled about the answer in regards to a sloppy set up of iis7 on my windows 7 ultimate system that would invoke duplciation errors locally but with powerdnn using the same files and backup does not invoke this. They can't really give me the answer to this secret since they simply utilize plesk control panel to interact with iis and since I don't have plesk on my local computer I have to result to getting to the guts of the iis to find the solution so if any of you can symposize with this problem or have yourself run into this in regards to throwing an error for having the same entries in handlers and moduels under system.webserver found also in httpmodules and httphandlers found in system.web I would appreciate any help I could get from you guys on this score.

Thanks a bundle and hope this solution works for others or at least is a heads up on possible reasons for upgrade failures other than simply modules. What I have learned from this journey is that it is not good to assume a problem on a one track lead as some, like mine was multitrack and knocking one of the two things down was not enough but both of them needed to be discovered and than tackled. This is what I had been doing for a couple of weeks or so now and I am happy to finally bring closure to this experience and hopefully this can be beneficial to someone else so you will not have to go through the same headache I did in regards to certain upgrades.

Like I may have said either here or on dnncreative magazine that most all my upgrades for various clients have been flawless but this one has taken the cake in regards to interesting issues in trying to make it happen successfully to a version that was known to be stable to upgrade to.

Take Care,

Bo