Sharepoint Search 2007 is blocked on Server 2008

You've got an error when installing Sharepoint Search on your shiny new Windows 2008 server. The message is a bit imprecise and the event viewer log shows as

"The application (Office SharePoint Server 2007, from vendor Microsoft) was hard-blocked and raised the following: You must install Office SharePoint Server 2007 with the most recent service pack. Office SharePoint Server 2007 without service packs has a known compatibility issue with this version of Windows."

Windows 2008 Server blocks the install of the Sharepoint 2007 Search application as it is not compatible with Server 2008 without Sharepoint SP1.

What this means, despite appearing otherwise, is not that Sharepoint needs to be installed with the SP1 (which it is anyway) but that the installer for Sharepoint Search does not include the SP1 files and is therefore incompatible.

The process to get around this is to download both SP1 for Sharepoint WSS and MOSS.

wssv3sp1-kb936988-x64-fullfile-en-us
officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x64-fullfile-en-us

Then extract both of these to the search_install\upgrades directory where the search_install is the name of the install directory. Note that there are no duplicate files.

i.e. C:\Install\MOSS-Search-2007-x64\Upgrades

This provides the installer with the SP’s and allows it to proceed when you run it again.

Changing the Name of the Sharepoint_AdminContent Database

Sharepoint during the initial installation creates a Sharepoint_AdminContent database with a GUID as a part of the db name. To a pedant like myself its annoying and when you have more than 1 sharepoint config on the same SQL server it's downright confusing. But there is no neat interface.

I did some research and found Keith Ritchies blog entry on PSConfig with some good notes on doing this.

However I struck a couple of issues with psconfig throwing errors and ended up modifying his command line as follows.

Keiths:
psconfig -cmd configdb -create -server krichie-fosqlp -database krichie-fo-wss-configdb -user adomain\SPService -password "SPServicePassword" -admincontentdatabase krichie-fo-wss-admin-content -dbuser adomain\SQLService -dbpassword "SQLServicePassword"

Remove the second dbuser and password details.

Now:
psconfig -cmd configdb -create -server krichie-fosqlp -database krichie-fo-wss-configdb -user adomain\SPService -password "SPServicePassword" -admincontentdatabase krichie-fo-wss-admin-content

Not sure how this affects anything but I could not get psconfig to acknowledge the username for the second database. It just did not like it. Admittedly my install is on Server 2008/SQL 2008 and Keiths post was dated back in 2006 so something may have changed.

Windows 2008 Server 64-bit & PHP5 32-bit

Using PHP5 32 bit on a 64 bit Windows 2008 server. Why? I dont know. I'll check that later. Problem with a new website index.php generating a Windows 404.17 error when its trying to treat the *.php file as a static file and not a PHP script.

The Website Advanced Settings (IIS7) needs to have Enable 32-bit changed from False to True.