I am trying to deploy a webpart to our live SharePoint instance.
STSADM.EXE -o AddSolution -filename webpart.wsp
I then get the following error:
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
webpart.wsp: The Solution installation failed.
This works fine when used against the the test SharePoint server.
I have double checked all of the permissions that I can think of. Any ideas?
This really could be anything. You will need to look at your log files in order to get more information about what went wrong. These are located in the LOGS folder in the SharePoint root directory. The easiest way of doing this is to use a tool like ULSViewer and start it up to capture the logs while you run the stsadm or PowerShell command.
Make sure you're running the command as farm administrator, and try temporarily disabling UAC on the server.
Are you the one that created the web part? Sometimes this can also be a result of the feature trying to reference an object that's not available on the farm (ie: writing to a list that doesn't exist, hard coded list GUID that doesn't match production, etc).
As others have said, check the ULS logs (should confirm the above scenario), ensure you're executing the command logged in as the config admin account, and ensure that the SharePoint Administrator service is running on all of the WFE's.
