Http Error: 503 the service is unavailable.. SharePoint System.ServiceModel

Ever had this?

I just did. This error found me just after I finished rolling one of our servers back onto the farm.. I will tell you how it came to not be on the farm a bit later *cough*

Symptoms:

Anyway, when I tried to navigate to the SharePoint Admin Site I got this error.. well trying to navigate anywhere on the server in SharePoint caused got me this error.

Diagnosis:

Something is wrong.. I will try the consult the mystical Event Viewer for guidance..

System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment+HostingManager/17653682System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException:
The service '/09c5aacd0f30411c96700fa84ffc0846/ProfilePropertyService.svc'
cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation. The exception message is: The farm is unavailable..
---> System.InvalidOperationException: The farm is unavailable. At blah blah blah..

Solution:

Pfff.. easy, I will just reset my Admin accounts for the services.. that should do the trick.

Well you should always check all the SharePoint Services and the username that runs them.. so make sure that password does not expire..

I first suffered here a bit http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmacleod/archive/2008/06/25/iis7-sharepoint-2007-fails-with-503-service-unavailable-errors.aspx

Then I realised it was not my service account.. I looked at the Event Log again

The Module DLL 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\isapi\owssvr.dll' could not be loaded due
to a configuration problem. The current configuration only supports loading images built for ax86 processor architecture.
The data field contains the error number. To learn more about this issue, including how to troubleshooting this kind of
processor architecture mismatch error, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=29349.

It took me a while to see the part in red.. because it wasn’t. What happened was during the process of troubleshooting a previous problem fiddled with one of the IIS options in the Application Pool.

I kind of forgot about it, but fixed it again after reading this

Installed: SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Enterprise Beta (x64) On: Windows Server 2008 Standard (x64) on 64 bit hardware

Attempts to access the Central Administration console led to IIS returning 503. The service is unavailable

And this error was found in the Application log

The Module DLL 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\isapi\owssvr.dll'
could not be loaded due to a configuration problem. The current configuration only supports loading images
built for a x86 processor architecture.

After much ado, the solution turned out to be:

1) Ensure that the enable32BitAppOnWin64 seeting for the “SharePoint Central Administration” app pool is set to False, and the same for the “SharePoint Web Services Root” app pool

2) Edit applicationHost.config:

Change:

<globalModules>
<add
name="SharePoint14Module"
image="C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\isapi\owssvr.dll"
preCondition="appPoolName=SharePoint Central Administration v4" />
</globalModules>

To:

<add
name="SharePoint14Module"
image="C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\isapi\owssvr.dll"
preCondition="appPoolName=SharePoint Central Administration v4,bitness64" />

I hope this helps somebody 🙂

bitness64 being the magic word here

Well now everything works pretty well.. at least this problem has been fixed, now it’s off to go fix something else.

Adrian