Patrick’s Bytes

There are quite some functions not possible to be done on SharePoint web interface, most admin works in SharePoint are done either via its web services or the all powerful stsadm.exe console tool.

There are more than 40 operations possible with stsadm.exe so its hard to remember all of them. So do bookmark this page for easy reference.

You cannot run the AD installation wizard with Windows Server 2008 Core, the only way to do it is using an answer. The documentation is a not detail enough at the moment for newbie to write a answer file from scratch. I had to look for documentation from Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server to get it right. So here I am posting my version for installing a fresh forest.

[DCInstall]
InstallDNS=Yes
Password=<administrator’s password>
RebootOnCompletion=No
ReplicaOrNewDomain=Domain
NewDomainDNSName=<specify you own domain name, i.e. contoso.com>
ForestLevel=2
DomainLevel=2
NewDomain=Forest
SafeModeAdminPassword=<password for restoration>

Save it in a text file and at the command prompt type:

dcpromo /answer:<location of answer file>

Ever got users send you a screen shot of his SharePoint site with just “Unexpected Error” message? Since MOSS 2007 is build upon ASP.NET 2.0 you can actually open web.config of the SharePoint site, modify “CallStack” attribute to true and “CustomErrors” to false. Now you can get full details of the error!