‘Password Expired’ misery in Moss

You changed your system password or it got expired. “Internal Server Error 500″ on sharepoint Central Administration site. All other sites give “Service Unavailable” error.

This was the password you were using for all your services and applications.

If you go to services.msc, Services are not up. IIS related. At first sight u’ll find services as “started” but if u stop them and restart, they wont start.

Password has to be changed in identity pools of Web apps. One way is to take ‘Properties’ of an identity pool and go to ‘Identity’ tab and change the password to new one.

Joel Oleson says: Do not change password of pools directly but use CA (gives the way how to do it using CA):
http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2007/07/06/how-to-change-service-accounts-and-their-passwords-in-moss-and-wss-3-0.aspx

Also go to ’services’ in computer management (Start -> Run -> services.msc) and change password for IIS Admin Service (restart this service). Services dependent on this service are: WWW Publishing Service, SMTP, Microsoft POP3 and Http SSL. So check all these services as well and change passwords if needed.

All of the sites came up changing passwords direcly from identity pools. However, CA was totally destroyed and gave 500 internal server error. Tried everything in the world: Config wizard, removed CA using Config Wiz and re create, no help, got the following error:

Event viewer said:
The start address <sts3://vanillargk:18936/contentdbid={21a97f3c-9ce7-4d9a-a0e0-5daf6c84117c}> cannot be crawled.
Context: Application ‘Serve search queries over help content’, Catalog ‘Search’
Details:
 Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.   (0×80041205)

Tried registry entries as in microsoft article but in vain:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Tried provision and unprovisioin using psconfig but no help:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Server/MS-SharePoint/Q_23874353.html

changing of AAM and changing of authentication methods was not possible since CA was not available:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/7db2013c-0644-4609-b1f2-53c6db2c6c68/

In the end what worked was to REPAIR sharepoint installation using setup. It fixed and CA was there.

By the way: Never use domain user accounts for services, which may require a change of password after a specific interval. If you have changed domain user password and facing the above issue, you can do the following: change the account under which the services are running, use an account whose password never changes like “administrator” (for dev purposes only). u can also set ‘local system’ account. change in services, and change in identity pools, thats it. Services to change are only sharepoint related (and not IIS Admin Service, just double check it by stopping and restarting, if it has problems, check the account under which it is running, and change only if needed). Use iisreset to view the change.

Best is to create separate service accounts, whose passwords should never expire, and use them for sharepoint related services and applications.