Administration: Stopping a SharePoint 2007 farm

I noticed today that a fair number of people have found this blog by searching for something along the lines of "sharepoint stop farm procedure" or "how to stop sharepoint farm", particularly from one very well known search engine. I briefly described how to go about doing that in my post titled "Administration: Migrating to a new SQL Server in MOSS (SQL 2005 to 2008)".

I thought I would clarify this procedure in a little more detail given that it seems to be a common query.

Technet describes the procedure for stopping a SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) farm as follows:

Stop the farm by performing the following steps:

1. On the server that is running the Central Administration Web site, in the Services snap-in, stop the following services:
• Windows SharePoint Services Administration service
• Windows SharePoint Services Search service
• Windows SharePoint Services Timer service
• Windows SharePoint Services Tracing service
• Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer service
2. On the server that is running the Central Administration Web site, at the command prompt, type iisreset /stop.
3. Repeat step 6 on each server in the farm.

As you can see, the procedure involves first stopping all MOSS related services on your server(s) hosting the Central Administration Web site, stopping IIS then repeating the process on all WFE servers.

Whenever I have had to carry out this procedure I have created a simple batch script to automate the process and ensure I don't miss any services out. This is easily achieved by pasting the following into a notepad file and saving it as a .bat:

net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Administration" /y

net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Search" /y

net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Timer" /y

net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Tracing" /y

net stop "Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer" /y

net stop "IIS Admin Service" /y

One other precaution I take to ensure the farm is inaccessible is to create a rule on the proxy server (e.g. the ISA Server array) to effectively block all Web access and present users with a useful error page.

I think it goes without saying that this process will prevent all access to a SharePoint server farm so should only be performed outside of peak hours with prior user notification.

I hope that helps!

Benjamin Athawes

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