SP2 Schema Update Not Included in SP3
I haven't seen anything in the SMS 2003 SP3 documentation that states that you must have SP2 installed before you install SP3, so I decided to try it in a VM running SMS 2003 SP1 to see if it would upgrade. The install proceeded without any complaints or warnings, and everything seemed to be fine. However, when I checked the AD schema to make sure that it included the dNSHostName schema extension that was added in SP2, it wasn't there. Here's the screenshot from Schema Admin after upgrading SP3 from SP1:
…and this is what it should look like with the schema extension that was originally released with SP2:
Next, I checked the SMSSETUP.LOG file and it did not mention attempting to perform any schema updates. I decided to manually extend the schema by running extadsch.exe from the \smssetup\bin\i386 folder from the expanded SP3 files and it updated the schema like it was supposed to. I expected that this would have been something that was done automatically as it was in SP2, or at least some communication somewhere to tell you to do this if you’re not upgrading from SP2. Usually service pack releases have all the previous features and patches rolled into them but apparently this one got missed. So for best practices, either make sure that you have SP2 installed before you install SP3 or run extadsch.exe from the \smssetup\bin\i386 directory to manually extend the schema. I have already reported this issue to Microsoft. Special thanks to my co-workers John Stafford for helping me to investigate this issue and to Anthony Puca for leading me to try this out in the first place.