This week, I’ve struggled a bit with my team to get MOSS installed in a simple two-server farm. Having gone through it, I have a greater appreciation for the kinds of problems people report on the MSDN forums and elsewhere.
The final farm configuration:
- SQL/Index/Intranet WFE inside the firewall.
- WFE in the DMZ.
- Some kind of firewall between the DMZ and the internal server.
Before we started the project, we let the client know which ports needed to be open. During the give and take, back and forth over that, we never explicitly said two important things:
- SSL means you need a certificate.
- The DMZ server must be part of a domain.
Day one, we showed up to install MOSS and learned that the domain accounts for database and MOSS hadn’t been created. To move things along, we went ahead and installed everything with a local account on the intranet server.
At this point, we discovered the confusion over the SSL certificate and, sadly, decided to have our infrastructure guy come back later that week to continue installing the DMZ server. In the mean time, we solution architects moved ahead with the business stuff.
A weekend goes by and the client obtains the certificate.
Our infrastructure guy shows up and discovers that the DMZ server is not joined to any domain (either a perimeter domain with limited trust or the intranet domain). We wasted nearly a 1/2 day on that. If we hadn’t let the missing SSL certificate bog us down, we would have discovered this earlier. Oh well….
Another day passes and the various security committees, interested parties and (not so) innocent bystanders all agree that it’s OK to join the DMZ server with the intranet domain (this is a POC, after all, not a production solution).
Infrastructure guy comes in to wrap things up. This time we successfully pass through the the modern-day gauntlet affectionately known as the "SharePoint Configuration Wizard." We have a peek in central administration and … yee haw! … DMZ server is listed in the farm. We look a little closer and realize we broke open the Champaign a mite bit early. WSS services is stuck in a "starting" status.
Long story short, it turns out that we forgot to change the identity of the service account via central administration from the original local account to the new domain account. We did that, re-ran the configuration wizard and voila! We were in business.
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I can almost beat your SSL certificate issue. We had everything created and were ready to extend the web app with SSL (then redirect port 80 in IIS). The administrator had a .cer file ready to go. But NONE of the options or crazy contortions to apply it in IIS will work–the site always displays a blank page like the site collection doesn’t exist.
After much banging of heads, we learned this was caused by the cert request not coming from that server. The administrator simply asked for a cert and was emailed the resulting key. With no private key, the SSL tunnel could not get built between the WFE and the browser. We wasted 1/2 day on that.