Services Unavailable: While Opening Central Administration site in Sharepoint

Hi All,

All of must see this error "Services Unavailabe", while accessing central admin in Sharepoint. I got an error message saying: Service Unavailable in the internet explorer. But my other MOSS sites were working perfectly fine!

I went into my IIS application pool for Central Administration web application, it had stopped without any reason. I tried to start it, and it would start but it did'nt solve the problem. I was stuck in the same loop i.e Service Unavailable when trying to access Central Admin web application.

Then i figured out that i need to change my System Account password which had full control to Central Admin web application. How do i do that ? Be careful, follow the steps properly:

Solution: Change the passwords if you receive a "Service Unavailable" error when trying to access Central Administration. Change the passwords for the Central Administration Web application pool identity and the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service by using the command line

1. On the computer running the Central Administration Web site, open the command line and navigate to the Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN folder.
2. At a command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
   stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin domain\username -password newpassword
   userlogin is the server farm account.
   For additional information, see Updatefarmcredentials: Stsadm operation (Windows SharePoint Services).
3. You must restart the Web application pool for the changes to be saved. At a command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
   iisreset /noforce
4. As an additional step, you can even Go to Start->Run and type services.msc and restart the Windows Timer services(which should use the newly changed password).
5. Try accessing the Central admin site and it should work normally as before.

Also refere: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288991(office.12).aspx

Thanks