Moving sharepoint installation to a different port / URL

Question

Hi,

We've installed Windows Search Server Express on one of our servers, which apparently runs on top of sharepoint.

Sharepoint was installed on port 80, where our "normal" intranet runs. When I disable the intranet and run the sharepoint site, everything works as intended. The intranet is linked in many places it would be a pain to move it, so I'm trying to move sharepoint to another "place" (hoping this is less of a pain), either a different port or as a virtual directory under the main site.

First, when I make any of these changes, it fails to get access to the intranet root. Not sure what it is looking for there, but ok, I give "Network service" (the acocunt the "Sharepoint 80" application pool is running under) access to the intranet root. This gets me one step further, I am stumped:

When I move the Sharepoint website to another port, it complains that it can't find default.aspx (there is none, but also it doesn't need it when running on port 80)

When I move it to a sub folder of the existing site, and try to open the global.asax in the browser, ti tells me that this extension is prohibited, even though the "Application configuration" is - as far as I understand - identical to that of the Sharepoint site, and allows GET, HEAD, POST, DEBUG for .asax.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Sharepoint sites should be able to run on any port- if you go into Sharepoint Central Admin and create or delete web applications without a problem.

Is it your intention to run heterogenously with Sharepoint and your regular site both on Port 80? I know that you can create a web application on 80 and then not have a root site collection ( Sharepoint applications consist of a Web Application that runs on a certain port and any number of Site Collections within that, each of which has it's own directory path and can contain lists, libraries, other Site Collections and so on ) just creating one on a different path, but I don't know for sure how that would work alongside an existing web site on the same port- it may not play nice. Again, you can create and delete site collections from the Sharepoint Central Admin page, which is linked from your Administrative Tools list on your server.I would try this first, as if it works it's an easy solution.

Is Windows Search Server Express related to Sharepoint's own search facilities? If it is you may find that it expects to run using some of the Shared Service Provider facilities, which even Sharepoint doesn't expect to be running on the same port as the sites it's providing services for.

Answer 2

Thank you! I found the option in the sharepoint administration website.

I add this response to detail the steps I have taken - maybe they are useful for someone else.

In the sharepoint administration website (running flawlessly on another port), I chose "create or extend web applications", then "extend existing web application".

There, from the the drop down "Web application", "change web application" opens a popup with the web applications available. Search server was installed as "Sharepoint 80", so I selected that.

Then I selected "Create new IIS website", with a new name and a new port. All the other options looked fine to me as default.

Clicking OK, this creates a new web site in IIS, which was configured correctly. it doesn't work via the IP address of the server (http://192.x.x.x:8080), only using the server name - but that's ok with me :)

I still had to make some adjustments with the access rights, but the full crawl is running and I can find a few documents already. Yay!

Answer 3

An even better way would be to create another alias (cname) in your DNS for your server, just set a different host header for each web site.

for example, in DNS your machine might be named 'intranet'. Create an alias for that machine named 'sharepoint'

In IIS, create a new website for sharepoint, and set the host header for that site to 'sharepoint.domain.com', where domain.com is your domain.

Do the same for the intranet website, but set the host header to 'intranet.domain.com'

That way, your users don't have to use another port in the URL.