I clearly have incomplete information on this situation, but all I know is that we had a web application in SharePoint Server 2007 that mysteriously disappeared today. It was our main app, running on port 80, and it no longer showed up in the Central Admin list of web apps. Attempts to hit the sites resulted in 404 errors. The IIS web site was still there on the SharePoint server, and the content database was still there, apparently fully intact. The devs that usually deploy to the server say that they were doing nothing at the time that this occurred.
So, how could the Web Application go AWOL like that? And what's the appropriate way to get it back? We seem to have gotten it back by creating a new SharePoint web app on that port and pointing it to the existing content database.
I looked at the IIS logs for the CA site for the last three days and see no activity that I'd consider suspicious. There are no hits other than a few redeployed solutions, and there is nothing indicating that the "/_admin/DeleteWebApplication.aspx" page was ever hit during this time. The timer jobs status page was viewed a few times here, too.
Other than the obvious "DeleteWebApplication.aspx" page, what might be indicative of the web app's being removed?
The server's application event log shows about 20 errors just like this one, starting at about the time the app failed:
Event Type: Error Event
Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3
Event Category: Topology Event
ID: 8214 Date: 5/25/2011
Time: 11:41:53 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HTS-APP1
Description: The description for Event ID ( 8214 ) in Source ( Windows SharePoint Services 3 ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: A request was made for a URL, http://myserver.mycompany.com, which has not been configured in Alternate Access Mappings. Some links may point to the Alternate Access URL for the default zone, http://myserver.mycompany.com. Review the Alternate Access mappings for this Web application at http://myserver:65200/_admin/AlternateUrlCollections.aspx and consider adding http://myserver.mycompany.com as a Public Alternate Access URL if it will be used frequently. Help on this error: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=114854.
The web app was originally set up to use the http://myserver.mycompany.com mapping instead of the myserver shortname. No other SharePoint-related events exist here.