HttpCode

I’ve put together a screencast that demonstrates how to configure a web application so that it can host MOSS MySites.

The basic steps are:

• Create the web application
• Create a site collection to be hosted in the newly created web application, make sure this is based on the ‘My Site Host Template’
• Create a managed path for the MySites
• Change the MySite settings in the SSP central admin to reflect the URL and managed path that was setup in the previous steps
• Enable self service site creation so that new MySites are created when the user clicks on the My Site link

The high quality version can be found here or the youtube version:

MOSS 2007 has the option to use a dedicated web front end server for crawling content:

Why would you want to do this:

Advantages:

• Search doesn’t compete with the end users – Large environments that need to crawl constantly can cause more traffic than normal user load, you don’t really want your users to experience slow pages just because your doing an index? By using a dedicated web front end that isn’t part of the load balanced cluster, your indexing won’t impact your users as much (I say as much, because you still need to think about the impacts of the database server).
• Easy to move the WFE into the load balanced cluster – It’s a rather crude disaster recovery method, but it’s not that hard to move this box into the load balanced cluster if you really need the extra capacity or if one of your other servers fail. After all it’s just a normal web front end, but one that is reserved for the indexer.
• Perfect place to run a backup central admin – You should always try to have more than one server running central admin (on a large farm anyway), that way if your main central admin server goes down, you still have a way to manage the farm.

Disadvantages:

• More hardware – The obvious disadvantage to having an extra machine is the requirement of more hardware, which also means:
• More cost – New hardware is an additional cost, but now that you have an idea of the advantages it brings, you can make a more informed decision.

 Joel has some other tips such as adding a robots.txt to servers that you don’t wish to participate in the indexing process.

If you run your SQL Server on a non standard port you may have experienced issues when installing SharePoint on this server. The standard psconfig utility has a field for the server name, if you give it a comma and then the port your SQL box is running on it will fail. The psconfig wizard doesn't understand the port number format. This isn't just related to SharePoint, I had to use this same trick when I was doing a Great Plains install.

The trick is to create an Alias, first run 'cliconfg', you should be presented with the following UI:

Select the Alias tab, then Add - you should then see the above dialog. Now you just need to enter the server alias, I normally just make this the server name, but your circumstances may be different, then unselect the 'Dynamically determine port' checkbox so you can enter the port number that your SQL Server runs on.

Once the Alias is setup you can refer to the SQL Server by the server alias that you have setup here.