On-premise Connect Installation Hangs Connecting to the Database

Symptoms: Installing with clean images on servers, the Connect Installation with the appropriate local Administrator permissions seemed to be successful but upon clicking “Done” its hangs indefinitely. Restarting the services does not help and the Connect Configuration Console on the local Connect server will not come up. Rebooting the VM will not bring Connect up. In the error.log, it reads:

“Start up error: java.lang.Exception: invalid backup folder: \\connectsharedstorage\connect.” START_UP    START_UP_ERROR….

Note: replace connectsharedstorage\connect with your UNC path to shared storage.

Solution: This error indicates that shared storage is expected by the database but is not configured on the Connect server. This may inadvertently be overlooked during an upgrade instance when a new server (perhaps with a new OS) replaces an older server. The fresh Connect installation, upon pointing to an existing upgraded database that has possibly been updated by script or maybe by the older server image, is expecting shared storage to be in place, but it is not yet configured on the new Connect server. To get past this, edit the Shared Storage entry in the PPS_Config table of the Connect Database to “NULL” and restart the services.