SharePoint 2016 one corrupt Server in the farm

Question

I have a similar issue to the one here but even worse. Not only will psconfig not start, I can't stop/start any SharePoint services or load SharePoint PS-snapin or management shell. Also can't uninstall SharePoint. Repair ran only after I was able to stop Project Server services but didn't fix anything. All other servers in the farm work fine. So there is currently no way to remove this server from the farm safely. I'm afraid to try removing installed CUs from this server as it might throw the farm into an unhealthy state.

My next thing to try would be to power down the server and decommission it, then remove it from the farm via Central Admin. Microsoft documentation says only remove a server that way if it is orphaned. Does anyone here know the impact of removing a server where SharePoint has not been uninstalled first?

Answer 1

Issue resolved! It turned out to be a bad 64 bit SQL alias. I usually only use the 32 bit alias so I didn't think to look at that until I remembered that another admin who had worked on these servers a long time ago used to like filling both 32 and 64 bit aliases. When I found some weird database connection failures that I couldn't explain in the event logs, that's when it dawned on me. Once I removed the 64 bit alias, everything on the server started working properly. See my full write-up for more details. Hope this helps someone.