Costas Tsaklas’ Blog

SBS 2008 includes the latest version of Windows SharePoint Services, WSS 3.0 and companyweb is built on this version.

In order to properly configure the environment we have to go through a list of Administrative Tasks that are listed in the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration module (which is accessed from the Administrative Tools menu).

This post is focusing on changing the Central Administration pool account and could seem simplistic for many, but I thing is very important for those with not much experience in SharePoint to understand what the necessary steps are to configure it properly.

Let’s start by creating a new user account for the Application Pool.  This should be a Standard User account

After the account is created, we can go to its Properties and we’ll see that the account is a member of the default SBS groups.

We can safely remove all the groups listed there and click OK

Now that we created the account, let’s go back Central Administration.  Towards the bottom of the screen we see the ‘Central Administration application pool account should be unique’ task.

 

Let’s see what is the current account that is used by the Central Admin Pool.  If we go to Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (from the Administrative Tools menu) and click on the Application Pools option, we’ll see on the right pane the SharePoint Central Administration pool using the NetworkService account.  This is the account we want to change.

This application pool is used by the SharePoint Central Administration site and we can verify that, by clicking on Sites, then select SharePoint Central Administration and click on Basic Settings… on the right pane.

From the window that opens up we can see that under Application Pool, the SharePoint Central Administration pool is listed

Now that we know what we need to change, let’s go back to the Administration Console and select the task we want to work on.

Here is the tricky part.  When we select the Change Service Accounts option,

we come to a page that let’s us select the Web Application pool , but the Central Administration Application Pool is not listed.  The only application pools listed there are the SBS SharePoint AppPool and the SharePoint – 80 pool.

In order to change the Central Administration Application Pool account we have to go to the Command Prompt(with Administrative credentials) and issue the following statement from the 12 hive (which is under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin) :

stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin <DOMAIN>\useraccount -password <password>

After that we must issue the iisreset /noforce command.

If we now go back to IIS Manager, and examine the account for the Central Admin. Pool, we’ll see that it was changed to our custom account…

 Running the stsadm command, added the user account to the appropriate security groups as well.

That’s all it takes to change the Central Administration Application Pool account.  The question now is what does the Service Accounts page change?  The next post will explain and show how to change the SBS SharePoint AppPool account.

One thing to keep in mind…. In SharePoint, everything must change from within the environment.