Home > MOSS 2007 > Fun with installing SharePoint on Win2k8

Fun with installing SharePoint on Win2k8

August 6th, 2008 Leave a comment Go to comments

From the beginning of this month and mostly after work hours, I have been heads down building various *STANDALONE* VM and non-VM SharePoint development environments.  For the life of me , there is nothing more boring than dealing with all these infrastructural craps , but sometimes there is no other choice, you know!  Installation went fairly smooth on majority of the machines. I took some notes during the setup process and I thought I’d give you some bullet points in this blog post.

1) First of all, it took a good couple of hours to find out that sysprep in Windows 2k8 is located in “C:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe” (Thanks to Kit Kai). Sysprep previously was in the Support.Cab file on the CD , not part of the OS. So you would extract the support.cab to a directory located at the Root and when the process finished upon first boot, it would delete this directory.

2) WSS 3.0 is no longer shipped as part of Windows 2008 server family. So the question is, why should it be named *Windows* SharePoint Service?I’m sure you will hear an answer soon from MS.

3) WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 binary files can’t be used to install SharePoint on a Windows 2008 server. You get a compatibility warning saying that the product is not compatible with win2k8. Fine.Thankfully, there is WSS SP1 slipstream and MOSS SP1 slipstream that sort of bundles each product with its respective SP1 together. Okay, we are good to go again.

4) After installing MOSS 2007 SP1 and running the configuration wizard successfully, I browsed to Central Administration and I receive a JavaScript error on all the Central Administration pages and on multiple lines saying “object expected”. When I tried to create a web application (extendvs.aspx) , there is another JavaScript error saying “Webform_postbackoptions is undefined”. Well, without post back, my SharePoint installation is useless.Isn’t it?  I tried all the followings, but the bad boy didn’t want to work:

* Added the site to my intranet zone
* Reinstalled MOSS 2007
* Cleared Cache, did IISRESET and you name it!
* Reinstalled the page (extendvs.aspx) from another server in which the page is properly functioning

Alternatively, I created the web application using stsadm , but upon brwosing to the site and choosing the right template to provision the site from , I got an “Access Denied” error message. Now, I know there is something seriously going on because I was doing all this using the administrator account which was also used to install SharePoint.

Armed with Firefox with Firebug (Fiddler was not helpful!), I put my debugger hat on and found out that I am getting an error on all of the scripts injected by webresource.axd http handler. ASP.NET 2.0 uses this built-in HttpHandler to serve
pages by publishing JavaScripts and other resources embedded in the OOTB SharePoint assemblies to various pages. btw, just as a side note, I’m not a big fan of embedding images,scripts,style sheets or some other content in compiled assemblies and relying on this http handler. In many cases ,I have seen that the WebResource.axd finds the resource, but returns nothing! so I kissed and put it aside. Too much headache. I’d stick to my old school file system way of shipping resources (inside my WSP solution). I am not cool! Yeah right….

Back to the issue. I ended up reinstalling the Application Server role, IIS and .Net framework 3.0 in the following orders , which basically was for me the fastest way to get up-and-running again. And yes, it fixed the issue!

1. Ran SharePoint products and technologies wizard to disconnect from the farm
2. Deleted the left over databases from SQL Server 2k8
3. Uninstalled Application Server Role
4. Uninstalled Web Server role (Uninstalls .Net Framework 3.0)
5. Restarted the machine.
6. Installed Application Server role
7. Installed the Web Server role (Installs .Net Framework 3.0)
8. Registered the aspnet with IIS using the command
“aspnet_regiis –i”
9. Ran SharePoint products and technologies wizard successfully to create a new farm

Categories: MOSS 2007 Tags:
  1. August 6th, 2008 at 03:17 | #1

    Hi Reza,

    you must have had a bad day installing MOSS on W2k8. I’ve done some installations on the same platform and i’m very pleased how the installation worked. I’ve only done farm installations with min. 2 servers. The installation requires SP1 which is fine by the way. It is a little bit nasty to install a language pack because the don’t exist as splipstreamed setups, but everythin worked fine for me. IIS7 is doing a great job. I’m using around 7 domain accounts for the entiere farm and everything was beautiful 🙂 Handling of the iis site creation and the improved SSL handling is really great. Extending sites for SSL usage and the hostheader handling is vastly improved.

    Your post sounds so negativ i won’t expect from an MVP. My experience is completly different and i would suggest installing moss only on w2k8 since it is a official released version.

    Maybe you give it another try 🙂

    Ciao Marco

  2. Reza Alirezaei
    August 6th, 2008 at 09:03 | #2

    Hello Marco,

    I am sorry if you got the impression that I am not liking Win2k8. First, that’s definitely not the case and the purpose of this post. Second, just because I am an MVP , it doesn’t mean that I can’t write my personal opinion and complain about something! Even if that’s something I breath with day and night(SharePoint).

    Please bear in mind that these environments are for development or R&D purposes.I am builidng them for myself and other devs in my team. Improved SSL or how IIS 7.0 is managing the pipeline mode is not my concern when a standalone installation is all I need and it’s giving me hard time 🙂

  3. August 6th, 2008 at 10:13 | #3

    Hi Reza,

    i didn’t want to sound rude. Being and becoming an MVP is as far as i know a pretty hard thing. The post sounds for me just like “sharepoint and w2k8 don’t work nice together”. The details you have given me corrects that statemnet 🙂

    So keep on blogging i reading your blog for a while and enjoy any peace of information 🙂

    Ciao Marco

  4. Reza Alirezaei
    August 6th, 2008 at 10:30 | #4

    No, you didn’t sound rude at all and that’s why I published your comment. I guess , the nature of a blog is to be a place so people can express their opinions (true or false). As long as there is no personal insult, I’d never ever censor comments, again because a blog is a place where everyone can express himself.Please read the first comment in this blog post :

    https://blogs.devhorizon.com/reza/?p=558

    As your suggestion , I changed couple of things in the post (and I thank you for that), to remove any potential negativity inferred. Thanks for reading my blog and have a nice (SharePointy:)) day.

  5. Serge Farkov
    August 6th, 2008 at 10:52 | #5

    Marco,

    Just to defend Reza’s position… Please note, the title of this post begins with words: “Fun with…”. So, to my observation is just a fair log of actions that Reza undertook during installation and get some fun BTW. This is just an ordinary installation SNAFU, and should not be treated too seriously.

    Ciao!

    Serge

  6. August 6th, 2008 at 14:27 | #6

    Hi,
    http://www.wssdemo.com is running in a virtual Hyper-v environment. MOSS Application Server, WFE, AD and SQL all running in separate 64bit W2K8 virtual machines with no problems. I did install .Net3.5 on the WFE before installing MOSS.

  7. Reza Alirezaei
    August 6th, 2008 at 15:27 | #7

    Ian,

    The only thing which I am speculating is different is that .NET Framework was pushed through Windows Update, normally i do this by hand. I’ve also heard that installing .NET Framework through Windows Update is a bit different than installing it by hand.

    Due to another security error I got upon creating my web applications via stsadm , again, I am speculating that the user rights for CA’s app pool identity (local admin) to access WebResource.axd( Temporary ASP.NET Files folder) was somehow messed up. Unfortunately , the re-installation workaround soon solved my issue , so I am just thinking loud here, without any proof to back it up!

    Again , this was NOT a farm installation. It was an standalone installation for 14 VM and non-VM boxes internally used by myself and my developers per each client/potential community work. We are successfully running a large server farm on Windows 2008 (x64) without even a single issue. Maybe that’s because I was not involved in rolling it up 🙂

  8. Bharat
    August 21st, 2008 at 05:11 | #8

    Hi Reza,

    came across your blog when searching for MOSS installation and this post in particular.

    I am an absolute n00b as far as windows server 2k3 and MOSS 2007 are concerned. I have a college project to be implemented in Sharepoint. My requirement is standalone installation.

    I have followed couple of online resources and ebooks but they seem to be incomplete. I tried to install MOSS couple of times and failed. One of the admin tasks after installation was “application pool account should be unique”. I re-installed windows server 2k3.

    I now have a Windows server 2k3 installed,IIS,SMTP,ASP enabled in IIS. I also installed VS 2005 and Workflow extensions for VS.

    All i need is a detailed installation procedure of MOSS 2k7 as a standalone( i have a trial version). Can you help me 🙁

    Thanks,
    Bharat 🙂

  9. Reza Alirezaei
    August 21st, 2008 at 16:19 | #9

    Bharat, Sorry I don’t have a step by step installation guide, but all I know is that standalone installation can be even trickier than a farm instillation and I have couple of examples to support this. Search my blog to see some issues.

    Just because you got a task that application pool should be unique , it doesn’t mean that you have to re-install Windows. Sometimes those are suggestions and instructions to scale your environment.

  10. February 21st, 2010 at 09:00 | #10

    I am getting a webform_postbackoption is undefined error.
    my environment
    wind2k3 sp2
    moss 2007
    iis 7.0

  11. Tinesh_Shah
    November 16th, 2010 at 06:33 | #11

    same error..

    I am getting a webform_postbackoption is undefined error.
    my environment
    wind2k3 sp2
    moss 2007
    iis 7.0
    .please help me and mail if possible

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