| My Domain controller died last week and with it went my SharePoint Web Front End and Exchange server. So, I spent a long weekend installing new hardware and extracting the SharePoint data so that I could bring it over to a new farm in a new domain.
Unfortunately, my backups did not extract properly since I wasn't going to the same versions of the OS or SQL Server. Thought I'd take the opportunity to upgrade to Server 2008 and SQL 2008. Caused me more work.
Fortunately, I could still access the SQL server via cached credentials. And, since I had put Reporting Services in SP Integrated mode it had an installation of MOSS on it. I turned on all the services there and then through a series of nasty hacks got it to recognize itself as the only WFE in the farm. Then I could do a current backup.
Got everything installed into the new domain and created a new farm. Restored all my backups and they worked fine….after I discovered a few things.
In this process one must remember the following:
If moving Sites from one domain to another, make sure the new domain does not duplicate the user account names of the old domain. They will look like they resolve, but you will get errors because the SIDs are different.
- Install everything with a totally new and differently named account. Then remove all the security from your sites and reconfigure it.
- If you miss one or more accounts that are named the same in both domains, they will resolve in the new domain and look like they are working, but will not allow access.
- If you have missed accounts, and are doing an stsadm.exe –o restore operation, you will get an error that "The File Exists". What this means, in this case, is that your CMD session is logged in with one of the duplicated account names and so you are getting a SID conflict. This is VERY poorly documented.
- Be sure to learn exactly where everything is in Server 2008. It, like in Vista, screws around with things in the control panel and even IIS7 looks different.
- While you must allow the IIS6 compatibility selections to be installed since you're using MOSS 2007, you won't actually be able to administer anything with that interface since you have MOSS.
And for my particular situation…
While Exchange and SharePoint can coexist on the same server just fine, one must install Exchange FIRST and then SharePoint. I didn't remember this and really don't want to go reinstall my farm now that I have it working. So, am using an external mail handler while I work on a separate Exchange server.
Now just have to figure out how to get OWA to work when Exchange isn't on the same server as your web server. This isn't a problem at work, but is a pain when I can't do NAT configurations based on domain names…silly SOHO routers don't do that. Maybe I'll have to invest in a business-class router. Been a long time since I've played with the Cisco IOS…even let my CCNA expire. Oh well. That's another blog.
Later. |