Today I've received another of the cases when SharePoint (v2) couldn't connect to the configuration database. This can be a common problem but it's not so horrible to solve it.
The reason for this is that SharePoint lost the connection to the database.
Reasons may be the following:
SQL or WMSDE database may not be running
- IIS may be running in IIS 5.0 isolation mode
- The account for connecting to SQL or WMSDE might be gone or with changed password
- update - SQL Server Embedded Edition might not be running (check services) - Thanks, deanoc (see the comments)
The solution to these is on the following link:
But I've found another reason that could be. Simple: The SQL is running, credentials are also ok and IIS isn't in the 5.0 isolation mode. The problem may occur if sharepoint simply can't find the database. Reasons for this may be many: the database has moved, dns has changed, ... In my case was the later. By changing the DNS server in the network we've had to add one more record manually to point to the correct one and the sites started to work.
