Bridging SharePoint's Faults

Although Microsoft SharePoint is a powerful, transforming technology in our enterprises, it presents many administrative obstacles in configuration, management, and security. Let’s look at some common headaches that IT professionals face when implementing SharePoint Products and Technologies.

The Random Port for Central Administration
When you perform a basic installation of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, the setup routine makes all configuration choices for you. Along the way, SharePoint setup selects a random port on which to publish the Central Administration website. This means that you’re forced to access Central Administration using a URL in the format http://server:port number, but you must know the port number. Remembering a random port number for one farm’s Central Administration site is painful enough. Multiply that by several farms, and you’ll quickly be checking yourself into the SharePoint funny farm.

Luckily, you can retrieve the port number by looking at the list of web applications in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) IIS Management snap-in. You can also use the Stsadm command (stsadm.exe). To use Stsadm, open a command prompt and focus it on the BIN folder by typing

cd %CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft SharedWeb Server Extensions\12\bin

Then type the command

stsadm o getadminport

to get the port number.

Better yet, you can set Central Administration on each of your farms to a standard port number of your choice. There are two ways to specify the port for Central Administration. The first is to perform an advanced installation instead of a basic installation. After performing an advanced installation, run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. The wizard presents the Configure SharePoint Central Administration Web Application page, where you can configure the port manually.

Alternatively, you can use Stsadm to configure the port after either a basic or advanced installation. From a command prompt focused on SharePoint’s BIN folder, type

stsadm o setadminport port
  port_number

Stsadm also takes other switches, such as -ssl, which lets you enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for the administration port.

The “Non-Fully Qualified” URL for Central Administration
Sometimes, the URL of a SharePoint web application isn’t what you want it to be. SharePoint Central Administration, for example, might be tied to a non-Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), such as http://server01:9999. You can change the URL of Central Administration to a more accessible name, such as http://server01.contoso .com:9999. To do so, open a command prompt and type

cd %CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server
  Extensions\12\bin

Then type

stsadm o addzoneurl http://<currentURL> urlzone default
  zonemappedurl http://<newURL>.

In our example, the command would be

stsadm -o addzoneurl http://server01:9999 -urlzone default
  -zonemappedurl http://server01.contoso.com:9999

Drilling Down to Use Stsadm
You’ve seen several examples of using Stsadm commands in this article, and in each you’ve had to drill down to its folder in the Program Files directory. You’ll quickly get tired of doing that. To make it easier to use Stsadm, use the following method to open a special Stsadm-enabled command prompt. Open Notepad and enter the following four commands, one per line:

@echo off
set path=%path%;%CommonProgramFiles%\microsoft shared  web server extensions\12\bin
cmd.exe
@echo on

Save the file as “STSADM Command Prompt.bat.” Include the quotation marks, so that the file is saved as a batch file and is not given a .txt extension. Double-click the batch file, and a command prompt will open. The command prompt includes the path to Stsadm, so you can use the command without specifying its full path.

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