Central Administration site - Service Unavailable

I was working on a client's environment this week when all of a sudden the Central Admin and Shared Service Provider sites stopped working. Requesting any URL from these sites returned a "Service Unavailable" message. The main content web site kept responding though.

When I checked IIS I noticed that the Application Pools for these web apps were stopping as soon as I put through a page request. I'd restart them and they would stop again straight away.

IISReset didn't do anything for me. Two Event Log errors entries being written each time the app pool was shut down. Details are below.

We executed our "Base Cotingency Plan" (i.e. we rebooted the server) and everything went back to working as expected.

I've no real insight on this one, but I thought I'd post it in case others come across it.

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1009
Date: 9/10/2007
Time: 12:33:13 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SHAREPOINT1
Description:
A process serving application pool 'SharePoint Central Administration v3' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '11380'. The process exit code was '0x80'.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
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Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1002
Date: 9/10/2007
Time: 12:33:13 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SHAREPOINT1
Description:
Application pool 'SharePoint Central Administration v3' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
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Discovery Wizard for SharePoint

I just found this handy free tool on the Quest website. It will scan your network for servers running SPS, MOSS or WSS (v2 and v3) and display basic information about your servers, site collections and sites.

Discovery Wizard for SharePoint

Large logs with MOSS

I noticed recently that the log files on my MOSS server were getting very large. These log files are located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS

Each log file was about 500 MB in size, and there were about 20 of them. This was not good. When I looked at the logs I noticed that I was getting a lot of messages for the general category.

So I ran the following command to turn off logging for the general category:
stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category "general" -tracelevel none

Bingo! Log files back to normal size. Some day when I have more time on my hands I'll try to find out what the messages mean.

You can also modify the number of log files MOSS generates from Central Admin:
1. From Central Admin, click Operations Management in the left panel
2. Click Diagnostic Logging
3. Modify the number of trace logs and click OK (I've set my test environment to 5)