SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I was looking at a SharePoint 2010 farm recently to check out the Web-analytics reports and   was quite shocked to not be able load the CA site I was simply getting a “Cannot connect to configuration database” error in the browser, and masses of Critical and Error warning messages in the WFE event logs, like the one below

and mass of 17806 & 18452 SQL server errors in the application log on the SQL Server all for “untrusted domain” errors

But strangely enough the Portal site on this farm was still running so the users were unaware.

After much head scratching and several hours later we realised that the password for the account running the CA web app, the Farm account , had expired.. ( one of my colleagues logged on to one of the WFE’s as the farm account was prompted to change its password).

Once we had resolved that issue (changed the password back to its previous value and set it to  non expiring ), I could get on and look at Web-Analytics..