How To

How to rename a WSS 3.0 server

Say you’ve got a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 server, and you’ve got to rename it — as in change the actual computer name. I found myself twice in that situation recently. How do you go about renaming it? It’s a three-step process, as outlined below. Plan for a half-hour outage, just to be on the safe side.

Step one:

Change the machine name. I hope no directions are needed for this. If you need them, you should abort the operation, and get someone more qualified to help.

Step two:

This only applies if your server is self-contained (it has IIS, SQL Server and SharePoint installed on the same machine). Change the name of the SQL Server install by following the excellent directions written by Tibor Karaszi. Like him, I prefer to go directly into the sysjobs table and edit the server names. When you’re done, don’t forget to either restart the machine or the SQL Server services.

Step three:

Per MS Tech Support, open the command prompt and type the following:

  • cd c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin
  • stsadm -o renameserver -oldservername [type in the name] -newservername [type in the name] (remove the brackets, just type the names by themselves)

Now open the SP Admin interface, go to Operations >> Alternate access mappings and modify the server names to reflect the new name. Modify all appropriate entries there. When you’re done, don’t forget to either restart the machine, or the SharePoint services.

Test the SP sites and make sure things are working as they should be. Remember, if you posted any images on your sites, and you used the machine name instead of the site URL for the image paths, the paths will now be broken, and you’ll need to go through each link and re-map it. MS Support didn’t know of any automated way of doing this. Of course, if you feel adventurous, you can back up the SP DB, then go through the SQL file with a text editor looking for instances of the name and replacing it with the new one. Then you can restore the DB from the modified backup file and see how things turn out. I don’t advise this though. You may mess up the text encoding, and may end up with weird characters in your content, not to mention you could also corrupt the DB.

That’s it, you’re done now. If you’d like to read up on the stsadm command-line tool, you can check out this article at the TechNet site.

Standard

10 thoughts on “How to rename a WSS 3.0 server”

  2. Pingback: Local references to old server name remain after Windows 2003 server rename

  3. Martin says:

    I have added default.aspx to the top of the list and still the default pages aren’t picked up, even when I navigate to a custom site I have to append default.aspx to the end of the url? SharePoint Designer doesn’t have any site settings, you just enter the root url of the site (http://) where all the underlining files are then available to you.

    Thanks.

    Like

  4. Martin says:

    Hi,

    I followed your steps to the dot and they worked fine but for some reason I now have to add default.aspx to the end of my wss 3.0 portal url to get to its home page. I’ve checked iis and within the documents tab I have default.asp declared meaning it should automatically navigate to the default.aspx pages. I have also found that SharePoint Designer doesn’t fully link to my renamed machine as when I try to link one of my custom lists to a new creation form within SD(listname/properties/supported files) by selecting my new custom form for new items the changes don’t reflect on my portal?

    Like

    • Martin, you will likely need to declare both default.asp and default.aspx within the IIS settings, and to rank the default.aspx file higher than default.asp. As for SharePoint Designer, I haven’t worked too much with it, but my guess is that you’ll need to check the site settings and make sure the new name is reflected there as well. And you may need to go through old code generated by the software while you still had the old name, and make sure to change any references to the server to reflect the new name.

      Like

  6. Thanks Raoul: Your instructions worked great for me. I skipped Step 2 because although my SP setup is self contained, it’s using “Windows Internal Database”. kemperd; thanks for the default.aspx tip!

    Like

  7. kemperd says:

    FYI: I had the same problem as TaShimzA. I found that I had to include default.aspx at the end of the url in order to access SharePoint Admin

    Like

  8. TaShimzA, looks to me like you didn’t quite follow my directions to the letter. Is there a reason you skipped Step 2? Are you sure you did everything in Step 3, and it was successful? Because if you did, the change should have happened properly.

    Like

  9. hi,

    i followed steps 1 & 3. got message that it was successful. but i’m unable to access sp admin. it still attempts to use the old name that sp used when installing.

    still can’t get sp to run any ideas?

    Like

Comments are closed.