January 25
Getting into MOSS when you are don't have permission
If you have ever been logged out of a SharePoint site (for example if you take over a development machine and you don't have permission to the SharePoint instance) it can be an almost impossible process to find someone to give you the appropriate permissions so that you can login. Luckily there are back door ways to get yourself the administration privileges you need in SharePoint - you will need to have access to the Server that the instance is installed on though.
One way to add access, is to to add yourself to the site collection administrators list in central administration (http://<SharePointCentralAdmin>/_admin/owners.aspx - Application Management - SharePoint Site Management -> Site Collection Administrators). However the good news is that the command line tool (stsadm) comes to the rescue on this one.
All you really need to do is use the sts.adm -o siteowner command to change the administrator login. I have opted to change the secondarylogin so as not to step on the primary login toes - however this will give you site collection administrator access to any collection you run the command against.
For example: eg: stsadm -o siteowner -url http://<SharePointInstance> -secondarylogin Domain\MyAccount
The next problem I have was getting into the Shared Service provider. Easy! Use the tool again, but against the sites that run the Shared Service provider
ie: stsadm -o siteowner -url http://<SharePointInstance>:12345/ssp/admin/ -secondarylogin Domain\MyAccount
Once you have admin privileges on the server, you can then go to 'Personalization Services Permissions' and add yourself as a user to access user profiles and properties etc.
And now you have your God like permissions on SharePoint once again!!
(note: I do NOT recommend this for production systems - this is merely a way of getting into development machines etc)
More information on the command:
stsadm.exe -o siteowner
-url <url>
[-ownerlogin <DOMAIN\name>]
[-secondarylogin <DOMAIN\name>]
More information on the STSADM tool:
The STSADM.exe admin tool is available in the default location: c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin. To see what actions are available with the tool you can run STSADM.exe –help which will output the operations that can be performed and STSADM.exe –help <operation name> to get more detailed documentation about a particular operation.
For more information about the STSADM.exe command:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/188f006d-aa66-4784-a65b-a31822aa13f71033.mspx
More details about STSADM.exe command-line operations and parameters:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsk01.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsk02.mspx?mfr=true
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