The Hacker who Rolls: Share point installation notes

Howdy all,

Just a short post for those wanting a hint in the right direction for installing Share point 2013.

Please note:

This is for a setup with a complete installation of sharepoint; meaning not a stand alone with a built in sql server express
The share point and sql server are on one server
It is part of a domain, so DNS, accounts are created on the domain controller

Start with this video:

Why you ask?
Because the MSDN documentation is very detailed, very exact and very dry reading.

Be-careful of :
Installing Share point stand-alone for Domain environments. It does not work with an active directory over a domain.

Please install via these tutorials.

Disclaimer:
I am in the middle of following them and have not yet finished the installation. will update when it is up and running :)

Some issues I am finding:

Creating a web application works fine, completing a site collection works fine, creating a site... not so much. By not so much, I mean I am able to create it, just unable to access it.

I have tried a bit of googling and found some potential reasons such as:

The Administration site is accessible externally. My thoughts so far is that through the install, windows is able to configure everything correctly, but sharepoint is unable to configure sites correctly, mainly the DNS, forward lookup etc.

Trouble shooting so far:
So far, there was an issue with an SSL site. What does SSL need, certificates, as such we went through and created a self signed certifcated, exported it, and added it to the share point trust zone.

A great tutorial for that can be found here

The new issues:

The site works in that it asks for credentials but gives a 404 file not found error. So in order to troubleshoot I am trying to create a non ssl site to see if it is to do with SSL somehow.
Running slow.. very slow
Is crashing quite a lot, when restarting the server, when create a web application and a site collection

Addressing the 404 file not found error:

I was unable to directly fix the error in asking for credentials then loading a 404, i.e nothing showing up. That is, I was unable to fix the error for a web application that is directly created for SSL.

A work around instead, was to create a web application without SSL, and then change it to have SSL. Basically creating on port 80 and then changing to port 443.

As said early, the thought was the DNS server does not automatically configure for site collection, or the creation of sites.

This blog post, which also comes in a white paper goes very advanced to solving sites with SSL. But do read the first part, as it gives great steps on creating a DNS new host A name. Which solves the problem of 404 file not found.

The key take aways are:

Configure the DNS, to have the correct FQDN, so that being on a domain, allows you to connect to the site, whether it being ssl or standard http
generate a certificate for the ssl. I advise using the selfssl as per step 3 in the guide. Please note: you must run it as administrator, but doing so opens cmd at the default location. So you have to manually move into the selfssl directory and execute the command from there.
When importing the certificate it can be hard to find the local computer certificates, instead of just local user, this is why selfssl is really great. It does that automatically
Bind the website in IIS so that the website and certificate are bound together, i.e it knows what certificate to expect.
Within sharepoint, change the http to https. Alternate access mappings can be found under central administration, not under security as one would think
add the trust in sharepoint, add the certificate and you should be good to go.

It is working
I followed the videos, and fought with creating an ssl site within sharepoint. I found that following the white paper (a guide to https and secure sockets layer in sharepoint 2013) and changing the non ssl site to an ssl site worked much better. Well technically, it actually worked :)

Some logging things to note
There are many many logs consistently created. I will update this tomorrow with the details.

update:

This user expains: "In my sharepoint 2010 development server owstimer.exe consumes > 1.2 GB Memory". This is not exactly my problem but owstimer just kept crashing.

The image: