How to Fix Central Administration: Service Unavailable Issue?

While working on MOSS Servers, you all must have faced 2 common issues quite frequently

1. You receive a "Cannot connect to the configuration database"
2. Service Unavailable

Basically, the configuration database is where SP stores all information about the SharePoint 2007 installation and the server farm, hence, it is required for the Central Administration to work fine.

Suddenly while you are in the middle of your important SharePoint deployment or configuration, either of these issues will prop up and eat up lengthy hours. Even the easiest solutions to all SharePoint problems i.e. IISReset or Server restart also do not end your miseries.

Hence, I decided, lets apply TRY-CATCH-FINALLY on these issues for once-n-for-all here.

For Issue#1:

Try to run the SharePoint configuration wizard once, follow these steps for the same:

Click Start, click Run, type cmd in the Open box, and then click OK. Change to the following directory: system drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin Run the following command: psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b

The above steps should fix the issue, but if your problem still persists, then check the event logs of your server. Checking those logs will let you know issues such as -

• Is your SQL server agent running?
• Credentials (app pool permissions) used for connecting to SQL Server is working or failing?
• Facing any network issues to be able to connect to DB?
  (this only applies if the SQL is applied on a separate box from MOSS 2007)
• so on..

For Issue#2:

If even after carrying out the above suggestions, you are not able to track down the problem, then you could unprovision Central Administration and then reprovision it.

This could be easily done via an STSADM command given below:

stsadm.exe -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService -servicename WSS_Administration

 
I sincerely hope this helps you all in fixing this critical MOSS 2007 Central Administration issue.