Sharepoint application not working!!

Question

hi,

I am facing a weird problem and no body seems to have a solution for it.

The thing is that i am working on a Sharepoint application. It was working fine until our organization underwent a network maintenance.

The next day i try to run my application and kaboom!! it throws me an error

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)

I later found out that during the maintenance the IP of my machine has changed. It is possible that the change of an IP could result in my sharepoint application not working!!

I did my research and found that nothing has been changed in my application and that the SQL server (which is on my machine itself) is working fine! And still my application is DEAD!!

Please help, any suggestions will be helpful!

thank you.

Answer 1

DON'T PANIC!

The error message is pretty clear and it's not related to Sharepoint. Your web application can no longer connect to the database.
Perhaps you have configured Windows Firewall (or another firewall) to allow connections to the database using your old IP. Maybe you haven't enabled Named Pipes or you have hard-coded the old IP address in your hosts file.
Or maybe your web application's account can no longer connect to the database. Changing a server's IP is no small change so maybe someone did a few more modifications as well.

If you can connect to your Central Administration site the problem is probably related to the Web Application's account. If you can't connect to Central Admin, the problem is related to the database connection.

To check the connection try to connect to the database using the exact same credentials (Provider Name, account, password etc.). You can do this either by using the Options tab of the SQL Server Management Studio connection dialog, or by writing a small program yourself to test the connection to the database.