Just when you think you have seen it all - I must share one you have NOT seen yet. Emphasis on YET???
As we forge ahead and architect these awesome solutions using MOSS - I suspect it is fairly easy to become enamored of some basics - you know, the little details that are the life-blood of your solution. :) Like I said - basics.
Basic 1) WSS is a life-blood underpinning of MOSS.
Basic 2) Without basic 1, there will be no basic 2 !!!
Today I experienced absolute bliss - from a MOSS perspective :)
I am working on an RTM upgrade. The basics are: I have a staging server - beta bits. I create a web application here, then restore a content database in SQL, and add that content database to the newly created web application. Finally, I'll upgrade this to RTM.
After a few days of tedious work - I'm flying along and everything is grand. Almost.
This morning I create a new web application. I open Central Admin, Application Management --> Create, etc. etc. etc. It creates the web app and returns to the screen where I can create the site collection. Here I navigate back to the Application Management --> Content Databases and I add my existing content database. I noticed something string... The content database added fine - but had zero sites in it. MMmmm I've seen this before. Usually you will notice this if you try to add a content database from 1) a different version of SQL Server, and sometimes 2) when you restore a content database ad add it to a web application with a different name than the original web application. But neither was the case here.
I worked through this exercise 4 or 5 times - thinking surely something simple is being overlooked.
Finally, I fire up another staging server - completely different setup - and start to work on this virtual machine. I see the same exact behavior!!!
Time for a coffee refill. Definitely weird. I had already built out 4 virtual machines and worked through this exercise for 3 days - nothing at all was different. Or so I thought.
Coming back from my cafine fix - I fire up Central Admin and notice right away something strange next to the serverName on the Home tab - there was no WSS service running. MMmmm - I built this out from scratch, setup MOSS, Central Admin site, services, etc. - and saved the staged image - simply to re-use several times. How did the WSS get stopped? Well, that is another issue - but when I started the WSS service - all worked perfectly - just like it should.
As an exercise - I stopped the WSS and stepped through the same things I was doing earlier - and sure enough, you can create a web application - and it does not log an iota of an issue - and all appears to be fine - except it never gets created.The really frustrating part is that no error gets logged stating something like, 'Hey dummy, you might want to start WSS before you try this', or 'ID10T to the max' - you know what I mean.