WebLog: My own experience with AAM (Alternate Access Mappings)
At first I thought I understood what AAM was, so I just setup mappings and everything seemed to work just fine. Eventually, Search stopped working or would work sporadically and I was without a clue to why. AAM, Host Headers, and DNS to me were three separate objects; I never put the connection between them together. As I Googled for a solution it became apparent that most of my search terms brought back articles and blogs about AAM issues. At first I ignored those articles, thinking that AAM had nothing to do with sharepoint search. My thinking couldn't have been further from the truth of my problem. I suspected that I might have a DNS problem and played with my DNS configuration and discovered that changes in my DNS and host headers could cause changes in Sharepoint's Search behavior, and sharepoint errors listed in the log files, but it took me almost 3 weeks of research before I started to see the connection. Every articles on AAM left me confused. Every article I read started out explaining the topic at a basic, easy to understand level, but would quickly jump the discussion into proxy servers and load balancing traffic across large server farms. So I figured AAM didn't realy matter to my little single server farm; I don't use a proxy or ISA server. Then I ran across Ivan Wilson's Blog and finally, someone actually stayed on topic. He wrote about AAM on a single server Farm. It was Ivan's article that cleared up much of my confusion because he stayed on the topic of how AAM worked. Reading Ivan's blog clearly explained how AAM (Alternate Access Mappings), DNS, and Host Headers all work together, causing me to realize why my sharepoint search could not work. Here's the link, If you are mixed up on the topic of AAM, then go here and become enlightened....A sharepoint Site by any other name...
Thanks Ivan.
|
Last modified at 5/1/2008 8:41 AM by Michael Angelo (angelom)
|
|