This post is the product of over 5+ weeks of pain and tedium. Why? Because that is how long the nightmare of installing the blog software on my system took.
Let's start back at the beginning at the end of February 2007.
Because
Mike Benkovich promised the crowd at a launch event that the free SharePoint Services 3.0 had a really easy to use and setup Blog functionality, I decided to give it a whirl. Shouldn't be hard, should it? I'm an experienced developer and have installed tons of web software in my day, and maintained numerous web servers. Plus it is a Microsoft product, so I assumed it would work fairly well out of the box.
Not knowing how wrong I was, I began undertaking the most painful installation I've ever done. A rough recap of the recent weeks:
1) Install sharepoint server 2007 from my MSDN subscription. Futz around trying to figure it out.
2) Discover after a week of frustration that the reason I couldn't get anything to work was because the Central Administration Website failed to install correctly. Any attempt to use it would throw Out of Memory Exceptions.
3) Uninstall and reinstall sharepoint server 2007. Discover that now ASP.NET will not function on my server. All ASP.NET pages simply throw an Out of memory Exception upon startup.
4) Completely uninstall Sharepoint 2007, IIS, ASP.NET and the .NET frameworks. Reinstall them all with all modern patches. Discover that IIS is still hosed and unworkable.
5) Swallow hard and realize that the next step is to reformat my server. It is my only server in my home environment, so it has all the DC, SQL, file sharing and IIS roles that need to be preserved.
6) Build a VM on my development machine and install W2K3R2, patch it and promote it to DC.
7) Move the DC roles over to the virtual machine and backup the OS partition of my server.
8) Reinstall W2K3R2 on the server. Patch, Add SQL, Patch, Promote to DC, Install Sharepoint 2007. Begin setup
9) Discover that the MSDE instance that Sharepoint installed hurled and got stuck in an un-uninstallable state. Excited to find that
the KB article on MS about how to "manually" uninstall a SQL instance relies upon the automatic uninstaller. Real bright, SQL Team. Ever think that the reason I was trying to manually uninstall it was that THE AUTOMATIC UNINSTALLER ISN'T WORKING?!?!?!?
10) Reformatted server AGAIN. Reinstalled 2003R2 AGAIN. Patched AGAIN. Installed it all AGAIN.
11) Went through the entire setup process of manually installing Sharepoint so that it would point to my SQL 2005 instance instead of installing MSDE.
12) Discovered that this installation of sharepoint somehow failed to create an actual web site in the root location.
13) Uninstalled and reinstalled Sharepoint 2007 AGAIN
14) Finally got a (mostly) working installation
15) Realized that it absolutely refused to allow anonymous authentication on any of the sites. (I'd had this issue several times already, but figured I'd spare you the details.)
16) Contemplated going postal.
17) In a fit of desparation, I sent an SOS message to an old acquaintance from here in Ames, IA,
Todd Klindt, who luckily enough, happens to be an outstanding Microsoft SharePoint MVP who was kind enough to give me a call and take a look at the installation.
18) After an hour or so of free tech support from Todd (man, I owe you, Todd) we declared the whole thing FUBARed, and came up with the plan that finally worked: Stop using the full blown SharePoint 2007, and just use the free, base level Share Point 3.0 and isolate the web server by building a VM inside my server with nothing but IIS and Sharepoint on it.
19) Created the virtual machine. Installed OS, patched. Installed base-level free sharepoint services 3.0. Configured.
20) When I saw that it worked, I began spontaneously screaming the Alleluia chorus at the top of my lungs. The ordeal was over.