SharePoint 5586 flood fixed

Hi SharePointers,

Another SharePoint first today.  I had set up a dev server for a colleague, went back in to take a look because she said she was having performance problems.  I fixed the root certificate issue, which certainly helped, but also there were a lot of 5586 messages left.  From the ULS logs:

Unknown SQL Exception 53 occurred. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.  A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)

I checked the SQL Server aliases (this server uses a named instance, after all!), checked the registry keys used for the aliases & the SharePoint Config db, and checked the SQL Server's network configuration, but nowhere was it using Named Pipes.

Turns out: wrong alias.  I generally use SPDB as my alias name, but if I went down one more line in the ULS logs:

ConnectionString: 'Data Source=ServerName_SPDB;Initial Catalog=master;Integrated Security=True'....

So somehow, the servername value I was using was in front of the alias - sounds like a bug in my AutoSPConfig XML file!  The rest of SharePoint is working fine, so there must be a service somewhere that's using this alias.  I'll dig for that next, but workaround for now, I set up a second alias for this value & no more log flood.

Hope this helps someone!