I was asked to take a look at a problem a customer had with a basic installation of WSS. Honestly it’s been a while since I did this and had to start by try remembering all the problems and pitfalls that could come up. The installation was to make a proof-of-concept so therefor I forgave them for doing the basic installation with the internal database.
They ran the binaries without any problem but when running the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard the installation quickly failed with the error “Failed to connect to the database server”.
We did all testing and troubleshooting with local Firewalls, loop back checks, accounts etc, and when accessing the internal database with SQL Management Studio it worked fine. In the log files the following was found that did not gave us that much.
The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
After some testing we started to notice that the server was behaving strange when doing other things. It turned out that Firewall ports between the server where we should install WSS 3.0 and AD had been blocked causing problems to authenticate the user that ran the wizard.