I recently had an issue with users not receiving alerts from one of my web applications. My 2007 farm consists of 5 servers – 4 are WFE’s and one moonlights as CA/Search/Index. I have about 15 web applications, each with one content DB. No load balancing.

My issue started when I was informed that two of our heavily alert-based sites were no longer receiving alerts. The first steps I took were to determine if alerts were working anywhere else in the environment. This allowed me to quickly narrow it down to a particular web application, where alerts were not working for any of the site collections.

I checked the logs and could find no issue. I made sure that McAfee was not blocking port 25, and that there had been no changes with the SMTP server – a redundant task being that I already knew alerts were working for the other web applications, but people in my environment have a ‘need’ to know what process have been followed even if they are redundant or a given.

After spinning my wheels there, I found this resource and ran through the stsadm commands. All returned favorable, but alerts were still inoperable. I tried bouncing the app pool for the web app and even went as far as rebooting the WFE. No luck. I finally had enough pressure and lack of options to open a ticket with Premier support.

Four hours later, we found that one of my other WFE’s had a TimerLock on the affected web applications content database. I would have never found this, as the two WFE’s host completely different sites and operate independant of one another. At least, that’s what I thought.

The issue was resolved by performing the following steps:

1. Ran the following query against the ‘Home_WSS_Content’ database:
select * from timerlock
Observed that the timer was locked by the P01 server.

2. Cleared the configuration cache on the P01 server:
a. Stop the ‘Windows SharePoint Services timer’ service.
b. Navigate to C:\ProgramData\Micorosft\SharePoint\Config\
c. Delete all XML file, and not the cache.ini file.
d. Open the cache.ini file, and replace its contents with 1. Save and exit.
e. Start the timer service and observe that the XML files regenerate.

3. We observed that alerts were enabled on the ‘Home’ web app by running the following command:
stsadm.exe-o getproperty -url http:// -pn alerts-enabled

4. Ran the following commands:
stsadm.exe -o setproperty -pn alerts-enabled -pv “false” -url http://
stsadm.exe -o setproperty -pn alerts-enabled -pv “true” -url http://

5. After a few minutes, we observed users receiving alert emails on the ‘SharePoint site catalog’ list.

I hope this helps someone out there.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vedvyas/archive/2009/09/02/troubleshooting-moss-alerts.aspx

Is this the article?

Kindest regards!