Ben There, Done That

I have a Stand Alone, SharePoint 2010 Standard Server and needed to do some testing on Enterprise.  So, I made a copy of the Standard Server, did some renaming of my VM and booted it up to convert it to an Enterprise license.  However, when I followed the the steps to update to Enterprise (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261946.aspx) I was receiving an error.

I checked the Windows Event Application log and was receiving and error about not having administrative permissions to launch the configuration wizard.  The first step I took was to add my farm administrator account to the Domain Admin, still no go.  So I added the farm administrator to the Enterprise Admin group…still nothing.

My next step?  Disable UAC.  I’ve had some problems with UAC and SharePoint servers before, but like to keep from disabling if I can.  My next issue was that my stand-alone server is a domain controller, therefore, not having the UAC settings in the control panel.  So I resorted to command line prompt.  To disable the UAC via the command line run this command:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

When I took the nessesary steps to upgrade to Enterprise after this is worked like a charm.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure if you need to have you farm admin in either of the administrator groups in AD as I forgot to pull them out after turning of the UAC, but I know for sure the UAC plays a part.

Once the upgrade to Enterprise has been completed you can turn the UAC back on by running:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

If anyone gets the chance to run this with the UAC disabled and the SharePoint farm administrator account removed from the Administrator groups, leave a comment and let me know how it goes.

So this weekend I decided to install SharePoint 2010 on my desktop at home.  My desktop is running Windows 7, and due to requirements of other software I need, I’m unable to run Windows Server 2008 on it.

Running a stand alone installation of SharePoint 2010 is great, however, I wanted to see if I could get a complete install on Windows 7 and user SQL Server 2008.  Fortunately, I found this blog post by Neil Hodgkinson that explained how to do it.  Everything appeared to be working great and the configuration wizard finished without any problems.  Unfortunately, that appearance didn’t last too long.

My problem arose when I went into Central Administration and, despite being a farm administrator, the first thing I noticed was I couldn’t create new web applications.  There were some other security issues as well, however, those are beside the point.  The purpose of this post is how to go about fixing this issue if you encounter the same thing.

After mulling over the issues for a few minutes, I remember are beloved User Access Control (UAC) and other issues I’ve seen when it is enabled on Windows Server.  So, I went into my UAC settings, disabled them complete, restarted my computer, logged into Central Administration and what do you know, it worked!  I can now create new web applications and have full control over my SharePoint 2010 installation.