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Renaming a Standalone SharePoint 2010 Server

October 23, 2011 by Joel Jeffery

OK. You never create standalone servers. I know. But, let’s just say you *did* have one, maybe for development or test, and let’s say you had such an environment on your laptop, and also let’s say your machine had an embarrassing name that you needed to change before you next demoed SharePoint stuff on it… OK, you get the picture. Smile

The Microsoft recommended steps are:

  1. Rename your PC using Computer properties:
    Renaming your PC
  2. Reboot.
  3. Run the PowerShell Command “Rename-SPServer”

There is only one problem with this suggested method: it’s a steaming pile of nonsense.

The correct procedure would be:

  1. Rename your server using “Rename-SPServer”
  2. Rename the PC using Computer properties
  3. Reboot
  4. Rename your SQL instances
  5. Restart SQL
  6. iisreset /noforce

If you are unlucky enough to have tried to follow the official guidelines and renamed the PC before executing Rename-SPServer, you would get a message like this when trying to launch the SharePoint Management Shell:

The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered.

Then the correct recovery would be:

  1. Rename the server using “stsadm -o renameserver”
  2. iisreset /noforce
  3. Rename your SQL instances.
  4. Restart SQL
  5. iisreset /noforce

Best of luck!

Filed Under: SharePoint 2010 Tagged With: PowerShell, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Administration

Joel is a full-stack cloud architect who codes. He is a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server and Azure specialist and Microsoft Certified Trainer.
He has over 20 years' experience with SharePoint and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
He's also co-founder of Microsoft Gold Partner JFDI Consulting Ltd. Read More…

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