Service Unavailable when accessing SharePoint Central Administration

There can be many, many issues to troubleshoot in a SharePoint server environment. Recently one of my clients was receiving a Service Unavailable error while trying to access the Web pages or any service provided by a Web application. If the Web application pool is unable to start you will receive this error.

One of the ways we can fix it is to reset the password for the Central Administration Web application pool identity and the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service. You can use the stsadm.exe utility to reset the password by following these steps. You should ensure the password has been changed on the domain controller because the credentials are matched with the domain controller. If the password has not been changed on the domain controller before you perform these steps, an error will occur and the changes will not take place.

1. Open the command line and navigate to the Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN folder.
2. Type the stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin -password
3. Reset IIS by typing iisreset /noforce to restart the Web application pool.

After you complete these steps on the computer running Central Administration, you should perform the following steps on every server in the farm:

1. Open the command line and navigate to the Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN folder.
2. Type stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin -password -local