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Ready reckoner for Companyweb Errors and their meanings

Following is a list of common errors encountered when browsing companyweb site on an SBS server.

The objective is not to offer the ultimate solution, but to provide pointers to help get to a faster resolution.

Page cannot be displayed. (DNS Error):

A Page cannot be displayed error when browsing https://companyweb occurs because of one of the following reasons:

1. DNS record for companyweb is missing in DNS.
2. SBS Server is pointing not pointing to itself for DNS. (Usually pointing to an external DNS server which cannot resolve https://companyweb).
3. IIS is stopped or another process has taken over port 80. ( I have seen a few cases where Apache had taken over the HTTP port.)

Browsing companyweb opens the Default Web Site:

This is another common issue which could occur due to the following reasons:

1. Host header is missing from the Companyweb website (SBS SharePoint site in case of SBS 2008 and SBS 2011).
2. Companyweb website is stopped.

HTTP 403 Forbidden Error when browsing Companyweb:

This usually means that Companyweb website is not extended. If the companyweb virtual server is present in the configuration database, you simply need to re-extend the site and map it to the existing virtual server.

Cannot connect to Configuration Database when browsing Companyweb:

The error is quite self explainatory and means that SharePoint has trouble connecting to the Configuration Database. Do keep in mind that SharePoint needs to connect to the configuration database first in order to locate the content database and display the webpage.
The way to go about resolving this error is to follow the same path:

1. Ensure that instance hosting Configuration database is started. (Please refer to the previous post for default SQL instances.) *
2. The Configuration Database is connected to the instance.
3. The Database files are present at the expected location.
4. A database of higher version is connected to the instance. (Example: Connecting a SQL 2005 database to MSDE)
5. If one of the sites is giving "Cannot connect to configuration database" and others are not, you must look closely at the settings of that particular site. Most common configuration errors are in setting the Application pool identities, where the account configured as the application pool identity does not have permissions on the SharePoint database.
6. Another common cause is when a SharePoint update has failed. So the SharePoint binaries were upgraded but the configuration database wasn't. Fixing this error involves looking at the upgrade logs, resolving the errors during the upgrade and then re-run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard. **

* To determine which instance is hosting the Configuration database, use the DSN registry key.
  WSS 2.0 : HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Secure\ConfigDb
  WSS 3.0 : HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\12.0\Secure\ConfigDB
  SharePoint Foundation : HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\14.0\Secure\ConfigDB

** To determine the version of the Configuration Database use the Versions table.

Cannot Connect to Database when browsing Companyweb:

(Different from Cannot connect to configuration database.)

This usually means that the we were able to connect to the configuration database, query the location of the content database but were not able to connect to the content database. The possible reasons being:
1. The content database is not attached to the SQL instance.
2. The database files are missing.
3. The identity used to access database does not have login permissions to the database.

HTTP 404 The Webpage cannot be found error when browsing companyweb:

Generically speaking, the process of browsing to a SharePoint site is as follows:

A 404 error means that we are not able to locate the default document (in most cases default.aspx) in the content database. This document is created when a site collection is created in the web application.

So the probable reasons could be:

1. A site collection has not been created.
2. Recently we had several issues where we saw this issue occuring due to a failed upgrade. In this case the patch went past upgrading the configuration database, however it failed before/ at upgrading the content database in question. We then went back to determining why the upgrade failed, fixed the problems based on the upgrade log and re-ran the configuration wizard.