Tuesday, January 6, 2009

SSP Administration Site Host Configuration

This is probably more if a minor rant than anything else. I had an issue where we needed to move a site from one SSP to another SSP. The reason had to do with this old posting (finally got around to fixing this). Our solution right now is to recreate the SSP.

If you go to Central Admin >> Application Management >> Manage this Farm's Shared Services, you will see you have the ability to change the association for web application from one SSP to another SSP. However, the catch is that if the web application is tagged as the "Administration site host" you cannot move the web application.

One option would be to create a new SSP, then create a new web application and then move the site collection from old web application to the new one. Not like that is hard however I started thinking I really should not have a dependency between the SSP admin web site (//ssp/admin) and my main site collection. I think the reason why most people get into this situation is because when they read most install instructions for MOSS they:

  1. Create a web application (in many cases, if this is a fresh install they do it right on port 80).
  2. Create a new SSP for the web application.
  3. Create a site collection for the new web application.

The result is that both their main site collection and SSP Admin website are now hosted in the same web application.

What I am going to do moving forward is:

  1. Create a web application (not using port 80 and plan using this for only the SSP admin site).
  2. Create a new SSP for the web application.
  3. Create another web application (this may be on port 80).
  4. Create a site collection in the second section web application.

Notice that there is no site collection created for the first web application and its only purpose is for hosting the SSP admin website.

If your environment is like above, and you want to get your core site collection into a different Web Application without doing the stsadm stuff, it is pretty simple (this only works if you have a single existing SSP):

  1. Create a web application.
  2. Create a new SSP for the new web application.
  3. Then go to "Manage this Farm's Shared Services" and you will see that you have two SSPs. The new one will have the new web application as the "Administration site host".
  4. Reconfigure the new SSP to be the same as the old SSP.
  5. WARNING – Take note of all custom configurations you have to the old SSP before continuing. You can also backup and restore the SSP using stsadm (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512095.aspx). I am not responsible if you did not do this before continuing to the next step. You really needed to do this anyways because you are moving to the new SSP.
  6. After taking note of all custom configurations to your old SSP; delete the old SSP.

The result will move any web applications from the old SSP to the new SSP and your old web application will no longer be the "Administration site host". As well, if the old SSP was the Default SSP, the new SSP will become the Default.

Moving forward, you now have the ability to move your web applications to different SSPs in Central Admin.

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