Event ID 3355

One of my clients had contacted me over the weekend complaining that their website worked intermittently for couple of days. Simple two box environment, SharePoint 2007 with no SPs installed (and I don’t blame them) and a SQL 2005 box.

Looking at the event viewer there were tons of 3355 errors on SharePoint (Cannot connect to SQL server. SQL Server not found.) and no errors on the SQL box.

Doing an online search I could see this Event ID 3355 was very popular and there were tons of posts dedicated to this topic.

So, I started with the obvious. Check the network connections, NIC cards, SQL box. All looked good, so I focused my attention on SharePoint server.

Another strange thing was that other five websites hosted on the same SharePoint box were working just fine except for the main important one.

\\YourSharePointServer\c$\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS

So, going through the SharePoint logs (see the above link on how to get to the logs) which were growing very fast and big (every hour around 3 GB of log files!) I noticed the error logs were populated 3 times/second with entries like this:

Unexpected While initializing navigation, found Page placeholder but object was not found at: /SITE/PAGES/PAGENAME.ASPX

So, I made my way to the page list for that site that hosted the page in question and removed the page
http://www.yoursite.com/Site/Pages/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Once the page was removed everything went to normal.

Turned out that page was created by a former employee who quit few days before, the page was left in draft status and the account was deleted from Active Directory. A Perfect SharePoint Storm!

I made sure the log files came back to a normal size and no other issues were present in the log files.

You’ve got to love SharePoint for all these wonderful adventures it offers.