pagenotfound

 

I’ve been working at a client building a brand new SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Edition environment to prepare for their migration from SharePoint 2010.  Everything had been going great until I needed to create a new Web Application one evening.  I had already created 3 other web applications without issue so I was quite surprised to receive the following error message.

PageNotDisplayed

My only option as you can tell was to select the X up in the right hand corner of the error message.  Interestingly enough Central Administration refreshes and the web application is there.  So I then try to create the root site collection and it immediately screams at me.  So it was evident even though it’s not functional and as I dug a little deeper I discovered that everything was created the Web Application, IIS, etc.  Then I had a 2AM epiphany that I  didn’t check to see if its an issue with the web.config  as I was determined to figure out exactly what was missing to cause this error.  So as I work my way through the directory structure of c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories I discover that the one for the new web application does not exist!  Boom I’m thrilled as I now know exactly why its not working.

As stated before it’s 2AM in the morning when I was working on this and I happened to look over and I see one of my cats all sprawled out and snug on a blanket in the corner.  Yes I said in the corner and my mind immediately connected that to my issue and that is its a TIMEOUT issue.  That does mean that I pictured my cat being in timeout because he was in the corner :).  Isn’t that what you call a work life balance?

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So now it was time to resolve the issue which was that we needed to give Central Administration more time to fully create the web application so that it doesn’t continue to timeout.  Now you might be wondering if there is a problem with the environment itself to cause it to be so slow that its timing out.  If that ran through your head kudos to you because there is a resource issue with this environment right now and we are waiting for the additional hardware to come in so that it can be brought fully up to speed.  Initially it did not click in my head even though it was a little slow I had not experienced any issues like this until this time and it was 2AM in the morning nobody else was even thinking about this environment as it wasn’t live yet.

The steps I went through to resolve this issue are as follow:

  • Open IIS Manager on the server hosting Central Administration
  • Expand the server name and then select Application Pools (List will appear in window to the right)
  • Select the SharePoint Central Administration v4 application pool.  In the Actions menu on the far right select Advanced Settings.
  • Locate the Process Model Section and change the “Shutdown Time Limit” to a higher value.  I choose 300 for this environment.
  • Close IIS and then initiate an IISRESET

iis

Once the reset has finished I deleted the web application stub that was created in Central Administration and then recreated it and all was grand!

One last note with this issue is that I really wish some of the error screens would make a lot more sense.  Not sure if you noticed but the error message says make sure the web address is correct or try to locate it using your search engine or your last resort wait a few minutes and refresh.  I absolutely love SharePoint and Microsoft but sometimes I wonder if the error messages are their attempt at humor :).