I ran into an interesting issue today that I had not encountered before. Although I recently did a Windows Update on our SP2013 development, single-server box, I do not believe it was the cause of the issue. I don’t know the exact cause, but here are the steps I took to resolve my issue.
Once the development farm came back online from a reboot after performing a Windows Update, I could not access our SharePoint sites. I got the typical “Application error” referencing my web.config file and such. So I checked IIS to see that all our Application Pools were running and found they were. Next I opened up Windows Services to check that all the SharePoint services were running and found they were, too. However, I did find that both the SQL Server and the SQL Server Agent were both disabled. When I attempted to re-enable them I was given an error. The error was a logon error for the account running the SQL Server service and the SQL Server Agent service. I found this strange because I had not changed them, however, I did change them to the farm account. This was not my initial choice, but I know it has the rights to all the databases I need.
I next did an IIS reset on the box and successfully opened our SharePoint sites. I came across another problem when I investigated our User Profile Synchronization Connections to make some modifications. Under Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications -> User Profile Service Application -> Configure Synchronization Connections I was given the following error message “An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the SharePoint Server Search service”.
What? Now what to do?
How I got this working was to stop and then start these two SharePoint services:
- User Profile Service
- User Profile Synchronization Service
Then I performed an IIS reset and voila! All my previous User Profile Sync Connections came back and all was good with the world.
I will have to investigate the issue of the SQL Server and SQL Server Agent account not being able to logon to the SQL Server instance as another topic.
Thanks,
Alex