Moving the server that hosts Central Administration

In our company for MOSS installation, we created a webfarm with three servers and Central Administration (CA) site was hosted on one of them. However, we added a fourth server later and wanted to use the fourth server to host the CA and do other management activities.

I went ahead and ran the SharePoint product and technologies configuration wizard on the fourth server and configured it to host the CA website using Advanced Settings. But the link to SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration link still took me to the server where CA was hosted initially. I removed the CA site from the first server but still the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration link continued to take me to the first server and the link failed as I had configured that machine not to host CA!

After a little research, I found that I needed to follow the following steps to accomplish my objective:

• First remove CA from the initial server before adding another server to host the CA site. Run the SharePoint product and technologies configuration wizard. Click next until you see an Advanced Settings button. Select Do not use this machine to host the web site. At this point, no server will be hosting CA!
• Now, on the server you wanted to move the CA hosting, run the SharePoint product and technologies configuration wizard. Click next until you see an Advanced Settings button. Select Use this machine to host the web site and finish configuring.

This did the trick.

Please note that you may want to backup the web.config file for CA on the initial server specially if you had made any changes to it for custom authentication providers etc. You should replace the web.config file on the new CA hosting server after you have configured it to host CA.

Long URL names in SharePoint give the following message in Explorer View: "Explorer View requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater and Web Folders"

Recently, we had this problem where long URLs in SharePoint caused Explorer View in Document Library to give this unhelpful mesage: "Explorer View requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater and Web Folders". Explorer View was working if the URL was shorter than 256 characters. We did a lot of research and could not find a solution and had to start asking our users to give smaller names to the sites and document libraries so that the URL length did not exceed 256 characters. This was really frustrating and became unacceptable after a point of time. We finally found a solution which involves updating a registry entry on the user's machine. So, without any further adieu, here is the registry entry that needs to be updated: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Internet Explorer -> Main -> FeatureControl -> KB325355_INCREASE_WEBFOLDER_MAXURLLENGTH_TO_260CHAR and add a new DWORD value 'iexplore.exe' and give it a value of 1. You can also save the below as a .reg file and ask the user to run it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\KB325355_INCREASE_WEBFOLDER_MAXURLLENGTH_TO_260CHAR]"iexplore.exe"=dword:00000001