I used PowerShell to deploy a solution to a SharePoint farm (h/t: Corey Roth and his blog post).
I then went to the central admin, accessed System Settings and then “Manage farm solutions” to deploy it to the farm and to my (slight) dismay, it got stuck in “deploying”.
I’ve seen this issue come up many times on the MSDN forums, so I was pretty nervous about it. I searched around a bit and found this helpful article (by a seemingly unattributed person from http://www.resolutionsnet.co.uk/). I cancelled the deployment job and when I clicked into the solution, it told me that it had successfully deployed the solution to three of the four servers in the farm.
I went to the errant server, stopped the timer service and restarted it. Windows server actually told me that the service failed to respond to the command, so that tells me that it was sick.
This time, when I went back to central admin, I was able to deploy it with no problem.
Hopefully this bit of info will help some in a bind one of the days.
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