I have encountered a problem with Audiencing in our SharePoint 2010 farm. Hopefully someone out here has encountered this before.
We have 2 web front ends (web1 and web2) 1 app server (app1) and a clustered SQL server. I have many web parts that are audience based on security groups. In the past this has been working flawlessly. Last week I had people reporting that they could see audienced information. This was sporadic. Some had their pages looking normal and others did not. I found that Web2 was showing audienced web parts.
I checked the settings of the web parts and found that the Audience field that should be in the Advanced settings was not there. Not unavailable or greyed out. Just plain gone. This was in all audienced information on this server.
Web1 was displaying it all just fine. You could edit a web part and everything was as it should be.
I found very little online that was helpful with this problem. I spoke with our infrastructure group that informed me that the weekend before there had been server updates performed on the servers. I’ve found that sometimes rerunning the SP configuration wizard fixes strange anomalies with SharePoint after the servers have been updated.
After running the configuration wizard, web2 was working just fine again. The audience settings were display and working properly. I thought this had resolved the issue.
This morning I came in and Web2 was back to not displaying the audience settings again.
In my research, there was mention that the problem could be in the User Profile service. UPS is only running on APP1. I confirmed that the service was not running on either web1 or web2.
Has anyone out there had a similar issue? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
