Ok…since December 26th, 2007, I've had an open support case with Microsoft Support in regards to some recurring errors that we were seeing in our SharePoint 2003 farm. Every hour, between 4-6 times depending on which server you look at, each server in the farm would log the error with event ID 1000: #50070: Unable to connect to the database <configuration database name> on <Sql server name>. Check the database connection information and make sure that the database server is running.
Well, as you can imagine, we checked the connection, and it was fine. We also checked everything else under the sun. Probably two or three times. We recreated the configuration database, and the errors quickly returned. We brought in people from the SQL team, and ran some extensive logging of all of the activity that was occuring, and couldn't find anything. We tried numerous hotfixes, and removed others that might have caused this as a side effect.
Finally, after 6 months, and numerous support engineers, I made the discovery by reviewing process monitor logs, that System Center Operations Manager was making a call on SharePoint at the same time that the errors were occuring.
A quick disable and stopping of the service showed that the errors stopped occuring. So…if you have these tedious event id 1000 errors, don't forget to check on external monitoring services to see if they are the culprit, as SCOM was in my case. It's nice to have a resolution to this. I thought I had stumped everyone at Microsoft. Well…I guess I actually did stump them since I figured it out in the end.
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