Today’s the day!
Quite sad really, I walked through the doors as an employee for the last time this morning.. No real sense of occaision about it. But seeing my desk as tidy as it is right now makes it sink in that today really is my last day here.. Everything that’s left is now sitting in a cardboard box on the floor next to me. My mobile, Remote access tokens and similar chattels are in the drawer ready to hand in to security and I now have a mountain of handovers to write. Hopefully it’ll be a relaxed morning before going to the pub at lunch time and never returning!!
Last night however was a different matter, we moved the Central Administration website from the current physical box it’s sitting on to the Virtual environment that the system moved to a week ago.
Now moving the central admin website is not a complicated affair, although having SSL does add a certain level of complexity. But here’s the order to do things in..
Run the SharePoint configuration wizard on the current central admin box, choosing “Do not disconnect from this server farm.” then click, No, this server will not house the Central admin facility.”. This removes the central admin from the server.
Now log onto the new admin server and repeat the above, this time the wizard will detect that there isn’t an admin website and will go straight into the site creation pages. Because you’re connecting into an existing farm, all of the database options will be configured, you just need to choose the port to run your admin pages on. To be honest as we’re going to use SSL, this doesn’t matter and can be any random high port.
Once the website has been provisioned, bring up the IIS manager console (Applying SSL is one of the few tasks you have to do on each web server through IIS admin!), Select the properties of the newly provisioned SharePoint Central Admin website and select Directory Security, then at the bottom click Server Certificates and apply your previously requested SSL certificate (I’m not going to tell you how to do this as there are TONS of blogs on the net with this info..)
Once the certificate is applied and you’re back on the previous screen, click the Edit button under Server certificates and choose the tick box against require secure channel.
Almost there now.. Bring up a command line that has access to STSADM and enter the following command:- STSADM -o setadminport -ssl -port 443
Finally.. IISRESET /noforce
And your work here is done.. When you connect to the named website, you should redirect onto SSL and be presented with your login request or your admin website.
Cheers
Reg.
