Recently after installing a new SharePoint 2010 farm I tried to access Central Admin. The site was giving me “Service Unavailable HTTP Error 503”. I checked in IIS and the Central Admin application pool in IIS was stopped. I started it and waited for a little bit it was still running. When I went to hit the Central Admin site the application pool would stop immediately. I had not run into this issue before.
The application pool was set to run under the service account (SP) I setup and used during install. I tried the local system account on the application pool and it would run fine but of course it would not connect to the DB as it did not have access (This was expected behavior). So it looked like the SP service account did not seem to have the proper access to run the application pool. I looked at the User Rights Assignment in Local Security Policy and noticed the “Log on as a batch job” was controlled through a domain policy as it was greyed out so that I could not change it to add the SP account.
Sure enough it was controlled by a domain group policy. I asked the domain admin to add the SP service account to the “Log on as a batch job”. The application pool ran just fine after that and life was good.
For a list of local server rights needed for SharePoint 2010 Service Accounts visit:
http://salaudeen.blogspot.com/2011/05/sharepoint-2010-service-accounts.html
