Kernel Confusion

Today I installed the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 machine in order to install the Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 R2 later on. I had to use the SPS because the SLD installer is incompatible with non-English MOSS farms… and Microsoft didn’t quite care about the users “whining” on TechNet.

After the SPS configuration wizard was done, I tried accessing the SharePoint Central Administration page… and got this:

 

 

I stopped looking at the event log at this point, what proved to be a time-costly mistake, more to that later. I started searching the Internet and found a lot of similar cases but none came close to mine. Most “answers” told you to disable IPv6. Seriously guys, this is NEVER a “solution”! It is at best a workaround… and won’t help in my case anyway. A little later I reviewed our MOSS documentation and stumbled across the solution: the application pool identity user did not have enough rights on the server. I forgot that using a “domain admin”-service account does NOT grant it the right to log on as a service! I really don’t like this behaviour as I like to start with a domain admin account and then, in case everything runs as expected, strip it to a least privileges account. So I added the service account to our server GPO and the application pool started and could reach the Central Administration site.

This is just another case of READ THE EVENTLOG CAREFULLY! There was a third entry I overlooked which even suggests the missing log on rights:

1. Collin Yeadon says:

   January 31, 2011 at 11:17 PM

   You sir, are the man! I started receiving this error, not knowing that the administrator password had been changed and sure enough the pool was set to use the admin. Changed to network service account, started the pool.. Bam! You saved me a lot of headache as I had already overlooked this 10 times.

   Thanks Mr. Schmidt!

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   • Christoph Schmidt says:

     February 1, 2011 at 10:18 AM

     Glad I could help

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2. sprab says:

   August 23, 2011 at 12:57 PM

   Hi,
   This could be done in Start SP services using local account.
   Eventually it works for me.

   Thanks,
   sprab

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