Basic MSDE Setup Question on Windows Server 2003

Dear Colleagues:
This is such an SQL newbie question its not even funny. To begin with,
please forgive my informality as well as my lack of any specific error
messages, etc.. . I think the questions are academic (the specific error
messages and notes are strewn about my desk at work).
Okay, so here I am, I have a shiny new Windows 2003 Advanced server. So I
want to set up a tiny sharepoint team services site, simple enough. Its the
lightweight version that is
included in the Front Page 2002 CD and pooft, instant sharepoint and badda
bing, you have a small website that small workgroups can use. Please note,
this is not a super confidential eyes only website, so if I had lax MSDE
security, it would not keep me awake at night.
So I download the MSDE from Microsoft and realize that I need to provide a
password for the sa account. A switch after setup.exe.
First, is there a way that I can forego this password, that is to say, that
there is a way for me to install MSDE without a service account password.
I provided the password, the install went great, but now I have issues
associating the sharepoint services site to the MSDE. Obviously, the MSDE
needs to know that sharepoint team services is a good boy.
My problem is that I do not see any configuration options in the small MSDE
engine, so the question here is, other than going to SQL 2000 full blown
where I can tweak things, is how to I tell MSDE that
the team services site, via IIS 6 (running in IIS5 mode) is okay to use it.
Ideally, my goal would be to install MSDE without having to provide a
password, but any advice that could be given would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Roger
To my knowledge, there is no way to install MSDE (or the full blown SQL Server, for that matter), without an sa password. It used to be that you could leave it blank, but that is obviously a security risk and that option has been eliminated.
As for your other question, it sounds like what you need to do is grant database access to the system account that your IIS server is running under. To do this, you can use the osql tool.
Go to a command prompt and type:
osql -U sa -S (local)
Note: If you provided an instance name during your installation, you should use (local)\<instance name>
You will be prompted for the password.
Next type the following 2 lines, replacing <account_name> with the name of the windown account that IIS is running under.
sp_grantlogin '<account_name>'
go
At this point, IIS should be able to connect to your MSDE installation. From there, it's hard to say what you might need to do. Presumably you need a database created within the database server. And after that is created you will need to grant database access to the login you created above. You can do that with something like:
sp_grantdbaccess 'Corporate\JeffL', 'Jeff'
GO
sp_addrolemember 'db_owner', 'Jeff'
GO
If you're not familiar with these types of operations, it might be best to install the full-blown SQL Server so that you can use the GUI interface to perform these operations.|||If you are trying to "configure" the installation of MSDE you need to get a
copy of the enterprise manager from a SQL 2000 CD or something and you can
then use that to connect to the MSDE database and configure it. MSDE itself
does not come with these tools as it is the "lite" version of SQL, but the
enterprise tools can be used with it to configure it.
Hopefully you have an actual SQL 2000 Server on your network somewhere that
you can use to connect to your MSDE database...
HTH.
"Jolly Student" <jolly@.joy.com> wrote in message
news:ifr1d.8926$G03.2990374@.news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.ne t...
> Dear Colleagues:
> This is such an SQL newbie question its not even funny. To begin with,
> please forgive my informality as well as my lack of any specific error
> messages, etc.. . I think the questions are academic (the specific error
> messages and notes are strewn about my desk at work).
> Okay, so here I am, I have a shiny new Windows 2003 Advanced server. So I
> want to set up a tiny sharepoint team services site, simple enough. Its
the
> lightweight version that is
> included in the Front Page 2002 CD and pooft, instant sharepoint and badda
> bing, you have a small website that small workgroups can use. Please note,
> this is not a super confidential eyes only website, so if I had lax MSDE
> security, it would not keep me awake at night.
> So I download the MSDE from Microsoft and realize that I need to provide a
> password for the sa account. A switch after setup.exe.
> First, is there a way that I can forego this password, that is to say,
that
> there is a way for me to install MSDE without a service account password.
> I provided the password, the install went great, but now I have issues
> associating the sharepoint services site to the MSDE. Obviously, the MSDE
> needs to know that sharepoint team services is a good boy.
> My problem is that I do not see any configuration options in the small
MSDE
> engine, so the question here is, other than going to SQL 2000 full blown
> where I can tweak things, is how to I tell MSDE that
> the team services site, via IIS 6 (running in IIS5 mode) is okay to use
it.
> Ideally, my goal would be to install MSDE without having to provide a
> password, but any advice that could be given would be appreciated.
> Thanks,
> Roger
>