Moving Central Admin (Again!)

You will note that I wrote about misadventures moving Central Admin a while back (http://bobklass.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-move-central-admin-site-even-if.html). Maybe I should have read my post before I went to do it again, but things seem to have worked out OK this time, sort of doing it the right way.

We added two more servers to our main North American farm (now four WFE's and an indexer, and I'm not sure how we will distribute other shared services - Enterprise stuff is new to us). We had previously been running Central Admin on one of our two WFE's and the indexer ONLY indexing. One of the new WFE's is to be dedicated to indexing, and it seemed like a good idea to move Central Admin there. This will make even more sense when we add decent load balancing to this setup.

So I ran the Config Wizard for the first time on the freshly built box and indicated that it should host Central Admin. When it was all done, it pops up Central Admin, running off the old host. Hmmm. Time to read my old post. Those misadventures didn't really seem to be relevant, but I was considering running the Config Wizard on the old host to remove it. Or mess with alternate access mappings. I may still have to do that - there is some baggage in there.

In the end, though, I typed in the URL to the new host and Central Admin was running (in two places!). From the new one I just stopped it on the old and everything seems to be fine. I guess that was the right way!

P.S. - There was just one more thing. After an IIS reset the CA site stopped functioning (I don't even care why). So I went into ../_admin/AlternateUrlCollections.aspx and changed CA there to point to my new site. NOW I'm golden.