You get a call from your users that they cannot check out files. They receive the error - “The URL … is invalid. It may refer to a nonexistent file or folder, or refer to a valid file or folder that is not in the current Web”
However, those same users can view files just fine. This error only occurs on check out. The files do exist and the users have permissions to check them out and edit them. This is happening for all users on the SharePoint farm, so at least it’s consistent. Funny, this worked fine last week.
On the SharePoint server, there’s nothing in the event logs or anything useful in the ULS logs. Let’s go over to SQL Server. Immediately we notice that one of the drives is very low on disk space. Checking the SQL logs, we see that transaction log (.ldf file) for the main content database is throwing errors that it can’t be expanded. We notice that the transaction log backups have started failing and thus the log file was not being shrunk. This is the issue.
Backing up the transaction log and setting the transaction file option to only increase by 1MB instead of some % fixed the issue. Once there was free space and the transaction log was shrunk to a respectable size SQL Server was happy.
Going back to SharePoint, the check outs work now. When SharePoint checks out a file, it starts a database transaction. When this happens, SQL will try to expand the transaction log if it’s out of room. If that can’t be done, things fail and SharePoint can’t check out the file.
Originally posted on the Project Leadership blog at http://www.projectleadership.net/blogs_details.php?id=3020 - the original post is no longer available.
