would this retract a solution from only one server in a farm?

Question

I have a webpart that failed on one web server and works fine on another. The issue seems to be related to the .DLL on the failing web server.

If i use the command

stsadm -o retractsolution

and specified in the -url field the name of the server that it was deployed on, would it retract it from only that server, or the entire MOSS farm?

unfortunately we have a prod environment which has these 2 web servers load balanced, and the dev and staging environments are just single web servers, so I can't test it before attempting.

Answer 1

That would retract the solution from all Web Front End servers. It does this via a timer job. Sharepoint also waits until the solution is retracted from all web servers before it shows the solution as "Retracted" in the central admin.

We had a situation where it used to fail on one server or another but we later found that IIS on the failing server itself would become non responsive. A patch resolved the issue later on and then we never had any issues while deploying and retracting on multiple servers.

Answer 2

It depends on where your assembly is installed.

If your assembly is installed into the Global Assembly Cache, that command will not remove it from your servers.

If your assembly is installed into the the Web Application Bin folder, then that command will remove it from the Bin folder for that Web Application (across all servers in your farm). If this is the only Web Application the solution is deployed to then it will effectively remove the assembly from all servers in the farm.