stsadm installfeature causes "The farm is unavailable" error
This October I was trying to install some features manually and while installing them using a batch file (as they were too many) it caused an error.
My command line was like below:
STSADM -o InstallFeature -filename FeatureName\feature.xml -force
Before doing this I had already copied necessary feature files to “Features” directory.
Solution:
1.
This happens when you do not have permissions on the database server. Make sure you have the necessary permissions.
2.
If you have recently updated your MOSS version to 12.0.0.6318 i.e. MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 Infrastructure Update (KB951695 & KB951297) then you might need to restart the PC/DB services.
3.
If you have updated SQL Server Express Edition to SQL Server then you need to restart the PC/DB services.
In my case just restarting machine helped. But in some cases you cannot restart server machine just like that. So in that case restarting the services might do well.
Let me know if this helped. Also let me know if there are better ways to do this. Or in case if you have faced different issues.