AppFabric “Access is denied”

 Applies to SharePoint 2016; not tested on other versions of SharePoint.  

Symptoms

 

-        CA Health Analyzer shows “One of the cache hosts in the cluster is down” and “One or more services have started or stopped unexpectedly” errors.

-        For the reported server on Health Analyzer, Distributed Cache is shown as “Status: Online” on PowerShell and “Status: Started” on CA’s “Services on Server” page.

-        AppFabric Caching Service is stopped on the reported server. When attempted to start, it gives “Access is denied”. It doesn’t leave any log entries for the failure in Application or Systems Event logs.

-        You verified that the password of the service account that runs the service is correct.

Cause

 

Missing value of connectionString in “C:\Program Files\AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server\DistributedCacheService.exe.config”. 

The root cause of the disappearance of the value is unknown. 

Resolution

 

Check the last modified date of DistributedCacheService.exe.config and compare it with the ones in unaffected/good Distributed Cache servers. If it has a later date, compare the content (you’ll have to copy the file over to your desktop first) and copy/paste the missing value from the unaffected server (or a backup file) to the affected server.


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