On the subject of the Central Admin website
I've been rooting round in SharePoint internals today, mostly out of curiosity, after a fellow engineer here at the GTSC mentioned changing the port number on which Central Admin is published. We have a supported way, and some unsupported ways, and some ways that are sort of outside the scope of SharePoint entirely. So I figured why not a blog post?
The officially supported way:
psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -port 5950
Pretty simple, but not commonly known (I had to double-check myself). Reprovisions (or more accurately, alters the existing provisioned copy of) your Central Admin site on the appropriate port. This command can also provision or unprovision Central Admin entirely, and can change the authentication scheme.
The unsupported way:
- open inetmgr.exe
- right-click the central admin website
- click properties
- on the first tab, change the port binding, click OK and go merrily about your business.
The downside here? Well the shortcut in your start menu will no longer point at the right port, for one thing. You may be able to live with that, but in addition, our config and deployment tools won't be able to talk to central admin if they need to, service packs and updates may break your changes and indeed future updates may flat-out fail.
Internally, the central admin URL is stored in two places, which won't be updated by this method. First, in the registry, at:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS
CentralAdministrationURL
REG_SZ
Secondly, in the config database in the 'objects' table, as part of the big bad voodoo 'properties' field in one or more rows (in my case, two rows). Exploring this deeply is probably beyond the scope of this post, suffice it to say: don't mess with the config DB, and don't change the Central Admin port this way if you can possibly avoid it.
A supportable alternative:
This is how my usual virtual machines are set up. I do not change the port on which Cental Admin was originally configured. I do however, add another IIS binding, but with a host header.
First, we need a hostname or host header. Often, you can add a DNS name, for example "admin.sharepoint.com", then we once more crack open inetmgr.exe, get the properties of the central admin site, and hit the advanced button in the IP binding section. You then:
This allows me to contact Central Admin from remote machines without punching holes in the firewall and without actually moving the existing CA site. The downside? If you run the psconfig command mentioned above, it'll wipe your additional bindings. And your menu shortcuts will still point to the original port. The upside? you don't have to remember the port number any more, In fact, I find it so useful that on my VMs I have a HOSTS file entry marked 'admin' pointing to 127.0.0.1 and a host header to match. I can just type 'admin' into the address bar and away we go.
So there are three things you can do to alter the port on which Central Admin is published, one of which puts you way outside supportable territory, and two of which we'll happily support. Go with the good two, guys!
